LONDON CALLING: Perhaps restrained by an exaggerated sense of its influence on the American electorate, the BBC refused to project a winner until nearly 4 am. But when it did, the sense of relief, and the hope that America's long national nightmare might really be over, was almost as strong here in Britain as in the United States. For the chattering classes, the US election became a matter of obsessive interest--indeed, for the past week the BBC's probing examination of swing voters in Virginia and likely turnout in Ohio left little room for the mundane bank failures, tragic knife slayings and looming by-elections. There were occasional complaints from resentful Little Englanders, but most people here seemed to share Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland's view that "the US election is our business" too.

So when the votes were finally counted, the universal European wish to usher George W. Bush into the dustbin of history made for widespread jubilation. If the left-leaning Guardian was triumphant, consider the conservative Daily Telegraph, whose editorialist welcomed Obama's opportunity to "transform America's view of itself and the world's view of America, which has rarely been more reviled." Even the Sun, Rupert Murdoch's resolutely down-market tabloid, declared that "there's no doubt Obama's administration will alter American society for good."

No British politician summoned the eloquence--or the familiarity with American literature--deployed by French politician Jack Lang, Mitterrand's former culture minister, who pronounced Obama "the kind of American we love. His is the America of jazz and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Kerouac and Kennedy." But the leaders of all three British parties were quick to celebrate a victory that Prime Minister Gordon Brown said would "live in history." Boris Johnson, the tousle-headed Tory mayor of London, endorsed Obama before the election--a popular as well as populist move for the leader of a multiethnic city.

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