Almost exactly halfway between my conception and my birth, a moment of sporting history took place that would have a significant impact on the rest of my life.

There was a time, not that long ago, when serious allegations that a president had had an affair with a Playboy model a year after he married his third wife and a few months after she gave birth to their son, and then cheated on both of them with a porn actor just a month later would have been a career-ending scandal. During the impeachment hearings following the revelations that President Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham reminded the upper chamber: “Impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honour and integrity to the office.”

On 18 March 2008, during a media feeding frenzy about statements made by his radical Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, presidential hopeful Barack Obama gave a speech in Philadelphia. His aim was to lay out his candidacy and experiences within the context of America’s racial history. Jeremy Corbyn needs to make a similar intervention over accusations of antisemitism. This is the speech he should, and could, give.

For quite some time during the primary season for the 2016 presidential race, Democratic party leaders were delighted that Donald Trump was leading the Republican pack. They assumed the brash reality TV star would expose the bigotry of the Republican base before flaming out and leaving a more plausible candidate beholden to an energised mob, and consequently unelectable. After Trump insulted Heidi Cruz (a Goldman Sachs executive and wife of fellow Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz) for her looks, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, Deborah Wasserman Schultz, said: “I want Donald Trump to talk every single day for the rest of this election.” He did. And he won.