President Barack Obama kept trying to wrap it up, get out of there and get on with it all.
"All right?" he said conclusively after dealing with the same question about global markets for the umpteenth time. His impeccably frozen listening position had held out a good 45 minutes of the press conference with Gordon Brown, as had his eloquent gestures and language. But the world's most popular man was getting fidgety beneath this heavily gilded Foreign Office ceiling.
Prime minister Brown, though, was having none of it. "George?" he hailed another of "my friends in the British media". George asked whether President Obama had a message for the England football team before its World Cup qualifier against Ukraine.
Resigned to further delay, Obama replied: "I'm having enough trouble back home picking ... the college basketball. The last thing I'm going to do is wade into European football."
Obama's arrival in London was set against a double backdrop: of his global super-stardom, and of a sour taste left on the British diplomatic palate by Brown's visit to Washington when the honour of being the first European leader to be hosted by Obama was tempered by the relegation of the "special relationship" to "partnership".
This has not only to do with affection between Labour and George Bush. Anyone who has read his books knows that Obama does not feel benign towards the UK in the same way that Ronald Reagan or the Bushes did, for reasons of heritage in the US and in Kenya.
But yesterday Obama appeared eager to put any pique to rest. After standing as still as a statue throughout Brown's desperately effusive welcome, Obama highlighted "the special relationship", which relaxed into "the United States as a peer of these other guys" in the G20.
This was not to be mistaken, however for the much-trumpeted "end of American hegemony" on which foreign secretary David Miliband briefs, about which Obama was asked. America, he said, had a "system of values" to which the world would always look, and "cannot miss the opportunity to lead".
If Brown's delight at the visit was sad in its way, the public's was effervescent. Among the crowds greeting Obama with American flags were many black Britons, including Rose Ellis, a nurse who had taken the day off with her boyfriend, Lucas. "He's my favourite person in the world," said Rose. "He's exciting, he's a leader of all people of colour and, well, he's cool, I mean he's HOT!" Lucas, a little less enthusiastically, added: "Yeah, he is."
But more than any previous visit by an American president, yesterday was charged with history - deep history, that is, dating back to the American revolution of 1776; a sense of restlessly creative America embarking on an adventure while the ancien régime plods on the edge of fin-de-something. Fin-de-Labour, for sure, with nothing other than the Tories to replace them, the party despised by America's founding fathers.
Although they agree on financial stimulus, it is a long time since such deep contrast existed between president and prime minister. Obama can say that "the US certainly has some accounting to do with regard to the regulatory system which was inadequate", and helped cause the crisis, because he is talking about the Bush administration. Brown cannot, because he would be talking about himself and his predecessor.
Then there was the body language and lexicon. One man, recently elected, exuded popularity and zest for the future while the other, unelected and soon to be voted out, resorted to weary hubris.
The warmest transatlantic embrace was between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who, while visiting in 1982, delivered one of his historic speeches in the royal gallery in the Palace of Westminster when he predicted that communism would soon be consigned to the "ash heap of history".
An even more passionate love-in followed between Blair and Bush when the latter came here in 2003 and visited the Queen at Windsor, an honour never before granted to a US president.
Blair and Bush, together in a war that Obama opposed, gushed a perfect synergy that was missing yesterday for all the endorsements of policy. What a lot has happened since 2003 - to America, that is, not Britain - to set the scene for the contrast of yesterday.
In Grosvenor Square, an icon in the history of protest, an anti-war demonstration carried not the rocks of 1968 but signs reading: "Jobs Not Bombs: YES WE CAN" - part pastiche, part acknowledgement that even in this constituency he is to be distinguished from his presidential predecessors.
"America is what it is," said Hillary Bowen, on her third peace march of this year. "And though I abhor what Obama is doing in Afghanistan, something has changed and there's a little more chance for Gaza, Iraq and with nuclear weapons."
On this trip, though, Obama's global rhetoric will run into something called national interests.
Brown may be fiscally on side, but not France or Germany, who held their own vindicated counter-event on Brown's front lawn yesterday afternoon, uncertain about throwing their taxpayers' money at banks and bankers.
And there are the giant two guests who arrived yesterday afternoon at Winfield House, residence of the US ambassador to London since it was gifted to America in 1955: presidents Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Hu Jintao of China.
For different reasons - one strategic, the other commercial - these men present formidable challenges to Obama's agenda, and at any other time each meeting would have entailed months of planning and great pomp.
Yesterday, though, Obama held the two summits - chess with the Russian Bear and majong with the Chinese Dragon - within two hours.
All the while, an adoring British public not on Threadneedle Street sought a peek at Obama's limo, if not the man himself.
"I've watched him all the way on television," said Samantha Groves, who had been shopping with her children in Camden, north London, "and we had to try and see him for real. I wouldn't miss that for anything."
June Merrett, from Archway, also in north London, was hoping to get "as close as I can to Obama".
"Well, I suppose something has to go wrong at some point, but he is rather wonderful, isn't he? Think of our lot, it's quite embarrassing."
Wheels of power
When your car is more than 5 metres long, armour-plated and weighs around 3 tonnes, it's not often you feel overshadowed on the road. But this week Gordon Brown's Daimler Super V8 limousine faces the awe-inspiring might of the vehicle occupied by Barack Obama. The US president's 4.5-tonne Cadillac limousine has already prompted a degree of over-excitable prose about its eight-inch armour plating, built in tear-gas cannon and oxygen supply and claimed ability to emerge unscathed from a direct missile strike. The 6.3-metre Beast, as it is popularly known, also features an interior that turns into an impregnable "panic room" and is followed close behind by another vehicle carrying a medical team and several litres of the president's AB blood type. But the Beast may have closer competition from elsewhere. Reports in Russia claim the Zil limousine which President Dmitry Medvedev is bringing to London is so tough it can survive a small nuclear attack "if the wind is blowing in a certain direction".
Peter Walker
