Will Brown lose the Obama PR war?

One could almost feel sorry for Gordon Brown on reading that Barack Obama will meet Tony Blair in London on Saturday morning. Blair excels at this kind of grip and grin occasion and one can easily imagine footage of Obama and Blair beaming at the cameras as Obama pays tribute to Blair’s work in the Middle East. Poor old Gordon won’t be able to compete on the star power front.

To make things worse, as Obama is doing a solo press conference outside Number Ten’s famous front door, Brown could end up on the cutting room floor before the evening news is broadcast in the States. If this happens, news of this humiliation will race back across the pond. It makes the Newsweek profile of Brown from 2005 in which his advisers explained how he was going to avoid being a John Major-style PM seem rather ironic:

“One of Brown’s closest allies, a man who doesn’t want his name publicly attached to a disparaging remark about the former prime minister, recalls being in the United States during the Major years: ‘Everybody there thought Thatcher was still prime minister.'”