Like most of his predecessors of the past 60 years or so Gordon Brown turns up at the White House on Tuesday as supplicant as well as ally.

The British prime minister’s meeting with Barack Obama will not be cast in such terms, of course. Mr Brown, after all, can boast he has won the, albeit rather demeaning, race to be the first European leader to secure an Oval Office audience with the new president. Such are their post-imperial neuroses that the British fret about these things.