Sheila Miyoshi Jager said the future president had a deep-seated need to be loved

Barack Obama proposed twice to a long-term girlfriend but ultimately decided that her race made her a political liability and married Michelle, a new biography has claimed.

Mr Obama fell in love with Sheila Miyoshi Jager, whose ancestry is Dutch and Japanese, before attending Harvard Law School. He continued to see her after he began dating the future first lady, according to Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow.

The author, who received a Pulitzer prize for a biography of Martin Luther King Jr, also claims that “Obama wrote somewhat elusively” to a girlfriend “that he had thought about and considered gayness but ultimately decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex”.