Today was one of those days when provincial newspaper readers suffer from News Famine. None of the nationals on sale in South Shropshire knew that Obama had won, and they weren’t taking any chances on prognostication. For, despite his significant lead in the opinion polls, many commentators had been airing the view that when it came to that lonely moment in the polling booth, a lot of white folk would find they just couldn’t cast their vote for a black leader.

I have been fairly sure for a couple of months that they were wrong, as it became more clear that blackness was one of the least important of Obama’s characteristics.

What has inspired millions of white Americans (and 61% of those who voted for Obama were not black or hispanic) was that they recognised a man who has integrity, gravitas, a sense of justice, and above all, sound judgement. That he is a skilled and impressive orator only adds to the mix.

Of course there are risks, given the sociological history of the US, in voting for an Afro-American – not least that his term will end fatally – but to run from those risks in favour of a candidate tainted by being of the same party as the incumbent and the disasters that surround him, would have been short-sighted and possibly terminally catastrophic for US world influence. America’s global reputation has reached what most hope will prove to be its nadir, and a radical, risky choice had to be made. As long as the US remains the most powerful nation in the world, the qualities of its leader are of paramount importance to the rest of us.

I congratulate the American electorate for giving world peace and justice a better chance through the choice they have made.

I thank them, too, for the fact that from now on it will be impossible to view any black person without being aware that beneath their other-coloured skin, they could possess the character, the talent and the drive to rise to the most influential position on Earth.

I thank them, too, for helping to remove the very last traces of a bigotry with which I, like most white westerners of the baby-boom, was shamefully, if unconsciously infected from a young age.