Last updated 08:03, Friday, 14 November 2008

IT DOESN’T happen often and it doesn’t always last for long but sometimes, just sometimes, the world experiences a moment of perfection.

One of those moments was when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Who knows what kind of president he will make?

The honeymoon will not last long before the criticism starts.

He will inherit unpopular wars and an economy in crisis. In fact, he has inherited a job that any self-respecting politician would be relieved to lose!

All that aside, for one shining moment last week we had one of those moments in history.

It was the kind of moment we experienced when the Berlin Wall came down, when Apartheid crumbled, when Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa and when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

It was a moment that gave us hope, because it showed that everything can be overcome.

The moment was underlined by television pictures of Jesse Jackson, who himself once sought to be America’s first black president.

The tears rolled down his cheeks as he watched President-elect Obama deliver his victory speech.

What a moment for him, and how sad that so many people were not there to witness the final flourishing of what they had started – people like Rosa Parks who, bone weary, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, and Martin Luther King who started black America on a path of peaceful protest which so often ended in violent death, including his own.

And I wish that John F Kennedy and his brother Bobby had been there. Both had the desire to stamp out racial hatred and injustice in their homeland.

It is too easy to get over-sentimental and to romanticise the election of a black man as president of the US.

Because his colour matters only in terms of history, and it is what he does from now on that will determine how he is judged.

Of course, our own leading politicians are having a bit of a time of it at the moment and I am starting to wonder whether Gordon Brown isn’t secretly pleased that there is a recession, because it seems that when it comes to money there’s nobody we trust more than him.

Labour beat all expectations by winning the Glenrothes by-election in Scotland last week. It was a massive victory for the party and for Brown himself, because nobody expected Labour to win.

If he keeps on track, keeps on focusing on the things that matter to people like the economy and jobs and putting food on their families’ tables, then Brown might just restore his own popularity.

But focusing on the important things does NOT include getting involved in a battle over a late-night radio programme and two stupid presenters.

I am disgusted with Jonathan Ross, especially, because he has three kids, including two daughters, of whom he is rightly proud. How would he feel if someone rang his home saying Russell Brand had been sleeping with his own daughter?

The row over Brand and Ross’s phone call to Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs was only knocked off the front pages by Obama’s win – and thank goodness for that.

I am a dedicated Jonathan Ross fan. I especially love his Saturday morning radio show where he tones it all down a bit and entertains with amusing anecdotes, kindly interviews and good music.

In fact, last Saturday most of my housework remained undone because I couldn’t face doing it without Jonathan amusing me in the background.

I did not hear the programme and I was not one of the two people who initially rang up on the night to complain. Nor was I one of the 30,000 or whatever who later complained to the BBC about something they had never heard.

I heard one comedian comment on how much he liked modern technology. For those who missed the original broadcast, he said, they could go online and be outraged again and again and again.

The public has made much more fuss than Sachs.

Let’s get over ourselves, I say! The phone call was nasty, stupid, tasteless and not even funny. But most of us didn’t even hear it.

And in the USA a black man has become president. That’s perspective.

Familiarity, it seems, breeds forgetfulness. I have written so many stories about the exploits of our Maryport Sea Cadets who win countless national competitions, took part in last year's Remembrance Parade in London and formed a fine guard of honour at this year's Maryport Remembrance Service. So please tell me how I could have overlooked them when, in this column last week, I spoke about the fine work being done for and by Maryport youth!