Across the pond

There was I this afternoon sitting on my sofa in Dorset watching the Inauguration Ceremony and being totally taken in by this young black from the mean streets of Chicago who is now the Boss in Washington. So gullible was I that I was feeling that here at last was an intelligent man, a reflective man, a man of integrity, a man who respected his forefathers, even though they had used the lash of the whip to get blacks like him to build the White House he now inhabits.

He said that

‘What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them’

In fact my own learnt journalistic cynicism was entirely washed away by the flood of his eloquence.

Well, not entirely, I did not trust my re-actions sitting in front of the television screen and watching nearly two million Americans being swayed by one man. An even bigger crowd than that German bloke conned in the days of my childhood.

What was name, Adolph something?

But I was brought up to think for myself. So I printed out the full text from the BBC website and sat down to study it coolly, without the Land of the Free drowning out my attempts to reason.

Horror of horrors, I was still impressed with the content.

‘Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.’

read even better than I had heard.

So I read it a second time. And then I found it, a sentence that irritated me.

‘We remain a young nation, but in the words of scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.’

I know he’s still only in his 40s, but surely he is too old still to be thinking about childish things.

Thank God, I put aside childish things aged about 12 when I stopped reading the Knockout and the Beano and devoted myself exclusively to the Daily Mail, which my father caused to be delivered through our letter box. I learnt the truth about the war from their band of fearless journalists who were risking their lives to discover it on the front lines.

So I went to today’s Daily Mail, and discovered that Lord Rothermere’s current employees are showing the same courage. Melanie Phillips reports,

The coverage is so gushing we might all drown.

But she is brave enough to save us

‘from this swooning Obama hysteria’.

She puts her case in a nutshell.

And there’s a still more troubling aspect of America’s new President. For his whole career has been solidly embedded in an ultra-radical tradition which believes in revolution from the grass-roots up – and which teaches that to gain power, an activist must pose as a centrist while pursuing his real agenda of radicalising the people and revolutionising society.

His appointments of all those moderates is just a con. He is posing as a softie but deep down inside, as only Melanie Phillips can see, he is as tough as Al Capone.

So back I went to read Obama’s speech for the third time. And then, of course, the truth was plain as a pike-staff.

In his speech Obama quotes just one of the 43 previous US Presidents. And who did he choose, George Washington, who took power by the sword. A freedom fighter to some, but a terrorist to the established order governed by our own dear King George.

So it’s goodbye the special relationship and Gordon Brown, when he finally gets to the White House, reportedly at the end of a long queue, should watch his back.

If Melanie Phillips is right.

Read the article yourself and email me if you can find any evidence that Melanie read his speech.

If Obama tries to bomb the Daily Mail I will eat my words and join the Home Guard.

But perhaps it is time for the youthful Lord Rothermere to look at his ancestors. And consider whether the kind of journalism that Northcliffe introduced with the Daily Mail in 1894, and which still rules at the Daily Mail, London Evening Standard, etc., is appropriate in 2009.