Outside the White House at dusk on Wednesday, at dusk , the warm summer evening was punctuated by the competing sounds of a roller-skate hockey game and several hundred anti-war protesters gathered for a “Vigil for Cindy Sheehan”.

It was a subdued jamboree of tambourine tapping, anti-war chants and people wearing “Bushit” T-shirts and bearing hand-written stickers with “mom”, “grandpa” and “wife”. Holding candles contained in silver foil, Styrofoam coffee cups or Evian water bottles, they had come to show support for Mrs Sheehan, the mother of a 24-year-old soldier, Casey, killed in Iraq.