IT is hard to see a leader like Barack Obama emerging in Britain in the near future – and I’m not talking about the colour of his skin.

Almost as remarkable as the arrival of a black man in the White House is the extraordinary excitement his inauguration has triggered – among people of all races.

Americans – who give their new president an unprecedented 83 per cent approval rating – believe he will deliver a proper health system, make them better off, combat catastrophic climate change, withdraw troops from Iraq and close down Guantanamo. And we all saw the estimated two million people braving sub-zero temperatures in Washington, just to be able to say: “I was there.”

Sadly, when I stood in Downing Street to watch Gordon Brown enter No 10 for the first time as Prime Minister, there was no crush of beaming faces up against the gates and next to no excitement.

David Cameron is odds-on to be our next Prime Minister but, despite his charisma and skills as an orator, there is no buzz of excitement about a Tory victory either.

The best most Brits can manage is a “time to give the other lot a go” attitude, grumble that all politicians are the same and vote in ever smaller numbers.

The closest our country has got to an Obama moment was Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, when the nation seemed to grin for weeks afterwards, but even that “new dawn”

fell well short of the Barack buzz.

Perhaps the lack of excitement about a Cameron new dawn is because deep disillusionment about the Blair government – in particular, the Iraq lies – has made voters determined not to be fooled twice.

But I think the primary reason for the US ecstasy is that Obama’s triumph ends an eight-year nightmare that we, surely, will never suffer. Economic bankruptcy, needless slaughter of US troops and foreign civilians alike, torture chambers across the world, rejection of science in stem cell research, runaway global warming – that is the disastrous George Bush record.

Truly, Americans, and the world, have paid a heavy price for the Florida vote-rigging and the Supreme Court coup that gave us this inept, ignorant and bigoted warmonger.

Only when you have sunk as low as the loathsome Bush, can spirits soar as high as they did in Washington this week.

VETERAN Labour MP Sir Gerald Kaufman is an orthodox Jew and a Zionist.

His grandparents were killed in the Holocaust and he wears a tie-clip presented to an Israeli war hero from the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

That’s why we should all listen when he condemns an Israeli general who, when told that 800 Palestinians had been slaughtered in Gaza, replied: “Five hundred of them were militants.”

Sir Gerald told MPs: “That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.”

REMEMBER how the Prime Minister and Chancellor won plaudits for outlawing “short-selling”, that destructive practice that allows shady hedge funds to bet billions on driving down share prices?

Well, the practice was only suspended – not banned – and quietly started again this month. On Wednesday, Barclays’ shares plunged by 33 per cent to 48p. Short-selling is the chief suspect.