What a week to be in America. Everyone I spoke to was proud of what they had done. “People say when they look at the flag, it feels like something different now,” one television announcer said. This was on the Fox channel, and she meant it in a good way.

The election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president is a signal moment. Could the US now elect a woman president? Hard to see why not, even if the US is clearly not ready to elect a Muslim president, and almost certainly not a gay or atheist president either.