British satirist Peter Briffa devises some columns that leading British newspaper columnists might have written. Here are a few from those writers who are also known to an American audience.

Robert Fisk (Middle East correspondent for The Independent):

Western liberals may find this hard to believe, but for the poor people in the Arab marshes the forthcoming US election barely registers on the imagination. What with the starvation, the poverty, the polluted water, and the daily rapes and murders being inflicted on them by the American troops who casually stroll the streets looking for new worlds to conquer, which rich white American takes over from the current rich white American is not an issue that sets the pulse racing.

In any case, nobody seriously believes George “Dubya” Bush will allow this election to take place.

Franklin Roosevelt stood for election four times, using the War on Japan and Germany as his excuse to break his own constitution. What’s to stop Bush nuking Iran, and then postponing the elections, Musharraf-like, on similar grounds?

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Max Hastings (columnist for The Guardian):

America may not have invented racism, but true to its capitalist roots, it was the first country on earth to realise its commercial potential and export it across the world like a package from DHL. To be black in America means to be poor: where the only career choices available are as either as a wide receiver for the Miami Dolphins, or as an extra on NYPD Blue playing a drug dealer. Maybe there’s a third. For one in a million African Americans there is the vague possibility that he might become a “gangsta rapper”.

It is a measure of Barack Obama’s potential that he has transcended these categories and is now in the box seat to become the President. If he achieves this extraordinary feat – and make no mistake, white America will do everything it can to stop this from happening – then he has the chance like no man before him to completely alter the political landscape, once and forever.

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Sir Simon Jenkins (former editor of The Times of London; now a Guardian columnist):

Hillary Clinton is the most dangerous woman alive. Not since Margaret Thatcher herself have we seen a woman who exuded the power urge with such naked avarice. She is the wife of the man who had Ricky Ray Rector executed, she is a woman who would steal the gold teeth of your still alive grandmother, who would nuke Iran so long as it polled well in Delaware, and unleash a herd of man-eating penguins on the tiny island of Tuvalu for the sheer damn hell of it. In short, Hillary’s Clinton’s blood lust makes George W. Bush look like a doe-eyed pacifist.

And yet, were I am American, I would have little hesitation in voting for her.

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Polly Toynbee (prominent feminist and columnist for The Guardian):

A tidal wave is sweeping across America. A tsunami of liberalism is washing across the Eastern Seaboard, wiping away the cobwebs of capitalism and Christianity, ushering in a new era of progressive secularism.

John Howard despatched in Australia. Tony Blair in the UK. Could George Bush be the third and most notable victory for those of us who campaigned against the Iraqi invasion?

Could we in Europe finally see the election of a President ready to institute health care for all, Sure Start centres for the children of the very poor, and an economy based more closely on the Swedish model?

Is America ready for Hillary Clinton?

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David Aaronovitch (columnist for The Times of London):

I remember the first time I met Hillary Clinton. I’d flown into Washington in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and there among the throng of journalists and tv crews all awaiting an interview with the beleaguered President, I suddenly saw her, standing in a corridor, quite alone, while her husband conducted what was fast becoming known as a charm offensive.

The press were obsessed with Lewinsky. Her full rounded cheery Jewish smile, her curvy figure, full bosom, and luscious lips. But for me it was Hillary who exuded a languid, repressed eroticism that hinted at dark, shadowy waters. Perhaps she was wearing a whalebone corset, just like a school-teacher on the Waltons.

It was then that I first realised that human sexuality is a complex octopus: it may have one face but it has many limbs, whose template cannot be contained by rules, divine, social, or otherwise.

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Nick Cohen (former leftist; columnist for The Observer):

It’s Barack this and Barack that. Lentil-chewing liberals who six months ago couldn’t have spoken his name let alone spell it, are propping up the bars throughout my part of North Islington, and in between the adulation for George Galloway, and the moaning about house prices, are twittering about Barack Obama like superannuated teenagers at a Take That reunion concert.

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Gary Younge (Britain’s best known Black columnist):

Ignore the media-generated hysteria of the New York Times and the San Antonio Gazette. The election of Barack Obama as President would be a disaster for all Afro-Americans. For all his courting of the disaffected Muslim vote, his boyish appeal to the soccer moms of the midwest, and his sly cultivation of impressionable east coast liberals, the man is a mere front for the vested interested of the Washington neocon establishment. They wouldn’t have let him get this far if he was a genuine radical.

Indeed, if President Coconut wins the next election, this could be the biggest setback to the civil rights movement since the death of Malcolm X.

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William Rees-Mogg (former editor of, and now columnist for, The Times of London):

Barack Obama is the one to watch. Morally concerned without being moralistic, sociable without being socialist, egalitarian yet meritocratic, profoundly secular yet deeply religious, he is the change candidate who offers continuity. Obama is the candidate who embodies the moment, yet one whose roots are seared deep into America’s shared past.

Not since John Kerry has America had such an outstanding candidate for the Presidency. Why then, do I feel it in my bones, that the next President of the United States will be Fred Thompson?