David Lammy has attacked David Cameron's attempts to claim common cause with Barack Obama in a piece in today's New Statesman.

"I know Obama," the higher education minister writes, adding of the US president-elect:

His political worldview is grounded in his experience as a community organiser. He has a deep-seated affinity with the people of Chicago's South Side among whom he has worked. He understands their daily struggles and the dreams they hold for their children. For Cameron to claim common cause with Obama is absurd and demeaning.

At prime minister's questions last Wednesday, a day after the US election result, both Cameron and Gordon Brown competed to attach themselves to the Obama bandwagon.



Referring to Brown's party conference jibe against him, Cameron suggested that Obama's victory proved it was time for a novice to take charge after all - someone like him or Obama, say.

Brown, meanwhile, replied that serious times needed serious people – such as him and Obama, for example.

In his article today, Lammy claims that Obama's message of change - unlike Cameron's - is substantive, being backed up by a "body of political experience". The Democratic candidate has "something to say about the economy, about protecting homeowners, supporting workers fearful of unemployment, and spreading opportunity in America."

His argument is that Cameron's policies on such topics is not well thought-out and is too prone to fall back on the view that "good government is less government".

Whether or not this is true, it is undeniable that after 11 years of Labour government, Cameron – like Obama – patently is the candidate of change. A more crucial distinction may be that the Tory leader is not necessarily the candidate of hope.

Obama's campaign message was in the most part a positive one – an argument for himself as the answer to the country's problems. He focused on the bright, if vague, future available to the nation if it voted for him, if the voters "put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day", as he put it in his victory speech.

By contrast, one fairly consistent theme of Cameron's leadership has been that of "broken Britain", of the dreadful state of the UK and its abysmal government and prime minister. His most recent party conference speech was notable for the time spent railing at exaggerated examples of today's hopelessly politically-correct Britain, where police could not pursue an armed criminal without filling out a risk assessment form, and teachers could not put a plaster on a child's knee without calling a first aid officer.



(There is a parallel here with Hillary Clinton, who arguably suffered in the Democratic primaries by choosing to counter Obama's message of optimism with one of pessimism – a hard sell in the US, and perhaps also in Britain.)

Lammy's friendship with Obama has led to predictions that the young MP will become "Britain's best-connected politician" now the Illinois senator has been elected president. The two first met at an event for black alumni of Harvard law school in 2005. Lammy told the Times:

I saw him every time I went back to the States. We stayed in touch. We had a lot to talk about, a lot in common. He was a senator in the biggest democracy in the world, I was a minister in one of the biggest democracies. Our cultural backgrounds were similar. We built up a professional friendship.

Lammy was born in 1972 – 11 years after Obama – to Guyanese immigrants, and raised by a single mother in Tottenham, north London. After winning a scholarship to the King's school in Peterborough, he studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at Harvard in Massachusetts.

He was elected MP for Tottenham in 2000, at the age of 27, replacing the long-standing MP, Bernie Grant, after the latter's death. Since then Lammy has been a minister in the Department of Health, the Department of Constitutional Affairs, and the Department for Culture.

Obama's success may now open doors for other American minority politicians – such as Bill Richardson, the Hispanic governor of New Mexico, and Bobby Jindal, the Indian-American governor of Louisiana. It is less clear what its impact will be for minority MPs in Europe.

In a recent International Herald Tribune article about whether Europe could produce its own version of Obama, Ashok Viswanathan of Operation Black Vote predicted that the UK could have a party leader from an ethnic minority in the next 10 to 15 years, and a minority member as PM in 30. My colleague Michael Tomasky discusses the same issue on his blog today.

Lammy – who was known as the "black Blair" before he became the "British Barack" - is one name often suggested.