Skipper

The Guardian leader today is headed: 'Leaders bond, Iraq splits'. Certainly the second part rings true, but not the first. As Nick Robinson notes(yes, I nicked his pic), Gordon was careful to avoid any statement of personal warmth with the US president, in contrast to Dubya who, as the leader noted, piled it on:

Gordon Brown was a humorous Scot, not a dour one, a problem solver with the same sense of morality. He was a principled man who wanted to get something done. He was a man who saw a glass half full, not half empty, and when it came to battling terrorism and providing leadership, "he gets it".

The explanation for this apparent lack of reciprocity, of course, is that Brown is striving to make a statement: unlike his predecessor, he is not Bush's poodle. There is no message his national constituency would better like to hear than that and Gordon has subtly let it be known: no tactile bonding, no jokes about shared likes, no crutch hugging jeans, no ill chosen sweater- just a businesslike suit and tie. Brown has already shown how subtle he is at communicating via symbols; his Cabinet appointments were gleaming with them and his subsequent public words have been cleverly nuanced to indicate shifts from the past.

Indeed, the whole business of distancing himself from the US has been achieved in this way. He was happy to allow junior ministers- Balloch- Brown, Alexander- to make statements edging away from too close a relationship with American foreign policy so that he could 'reinforce' the Atlantic alliance with his own careful statement. US officials were 'worried' we were told, even 'irritated', but Gordon was happy to let these apparent slights remain: the signals were received. So it follows that he has carried on passively communicating during his visit, apparently moving closer while actually stepping back.

That Bush seemed to understand all this is not just evidence of his political acuteness, he is now squarely a lame duck president who desperately needs his British ally to stand firm while he plays out the next 18 months or so. Since Blair flew over in 2001 to stand 'shoulder to shoulder' and sign blank cheques of support, the relative power relationship has substantially shifted.