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Saturday 17 May 2008

A diplomat who could yet be the British Obama

Paul Boateng, our man in South Africa, dismisses comparisons with the American presidential contender. But Tim Walker says he has unfinished business in Westminster

‘I am and always have been an activist,’ says Paul Boateng, the British High Commissioner to South Africa. ‘As a lawyer, a Methodist lay preacher and now as a diplomat, that is what I am. It is how I have been brought up and I can’t imagine ever being anything other than that.’

Boateng’s posting comes to an end next May and somehow one can’t quite see this Hackney-born, one-time firebrand of the Greater London Council allowing himself to be quietly packed off to the Lords. He will then be 57, still relatively youthful by Westminster standards and, as his late Ghanaian father, Kwaku, once told the Daily Mail, it is not inconceivable that his boy might one day, ‘with the help of God’, make it to the highest office his country has to offer.

Boateng as the British Obama is an intriguing idea. Here is another black man who is every bit as able and charismatic and, what is more, as far as the Labour party kingmakers are concerned, quite undamaged by any association with the disastrous administration of Gordon Brown.

He knows very well that he couldn’t possibly announce his intentions at this point: as High Commissioner, he has to be above politics. ‘I am afraid I don’t see any comparisons between myself and Barack Obama,’ he says, laughing. ‘Except to say, of course, that Mr Obama and I both have roots in this part of the world and no doubt he would count himself very fortunate, as I do, to have been given so many opportunities in this life.’

And yet there are some things he says that feel like the vague, perhaps even subconscious, beginnings of a campaign. He tells me he senses ‘a disconnect’ between politicians and the people they are supposed to represent all over the world, which includes Britain of course. ‘The challenge in 21st-century politics is a global one — how we can connect the politicians with the people. It is a problem that has been made all the more acute by the collapse of the old ideological boundaries. The challenge is surmountable so long as the politicians — like the founding fathers of South Africa — have a moral compass and keep to its directions.’

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