Brown plays catch up with Obama

With Barack Obama surging ahead in the race for the White House - his wins in Wisconsin and Hawaii on Tuesday were his ninth and tenth on the trot - it seems Gordon Brown is rueing the day he turned down a meeting with him at Downing Street last summer. Reports are that the PM is now frantically trying to build bridges with the man who may be America's next president if he can keep up the current momentum against his rival Hillary Clinton and then beat off the Republicans' John McCain in November.

It turns out that Brown snubbed Obama when the Illinois senator was planning to meet European leaders in a tour designed to bolster his foreign policy credentials before hitting the US campaign trail. Intermediaries made arrangements for a meeting but Brown was reportedly reluctant to host a formal get-together. Instead, he offered only what is known in Whitehall as a "drop by", in which the PM would speak briefly to him in private. Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, offered Obama the full welcome at the Elysee Palace.

According to the Times, sources in Washington and London believe that Brown was worried about being seen to help Obama at a time when Hillary Clinton appeared to be the likely nominee. "Downing Street pushed [Obama] away," said one source while another put it more succinctly: "They got the willies about the whole thing."

At the British Embassy in Washington this week, they were busy denying that Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the ambassador, was now under orders to launch a belated charm offensive, though a source said: “Obama matters now in a way he did not so much last summer.”