It felt especially good to be a Brit in Washington this week. The successor to George III was in town but, my goodness, how a couple of centuries of time’s healing balm can take the sting out of the revolutionary grievance.

At the British Embassy garden party, senior figures from the Bush Administration and ambitious members of Congress not lucky enough to snag an invitation to dinner at the White House elbowed their way past goggle-eyed Texans to get within curtsying distance of the Royal Presence.

On morning TV shows presenters gushed more effusively about the Queen’s general elegance and fine octagenarian fettle than any loyal subject could possibly manage. Outside Blair House, where the Queen was staying (yes, it really is called Blair House – one can only guess at the ironic smile on royal lips as she pondered events across the ocean) crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of the monarch.

Tony Blair was finally immolated on the altar of his Atlanticism this week, but the reception given the Queen over here was a useful reminder that the bonds of Anglo-American friendship are easily old enough and strong enough to withstand a bungled war or two.

And yet, for all the familiar Anglomania in the streets and on TV screens, another European country was on the minds and even – quelle trahison! – in the hearts of many in America’s political establishment.

As the band at the embassy played Rule Britannia and the theme from James Bond, my imagination fancied it heard other tunes wafting out of the White House and the State Department, snatches of Piaf and Trenet on the afternoon air. As President Bush stood at rock-rimmed attention to God Save the Queen, were those the words of La Marseillaise that formed uncertainly on his tight lips? In official American circles, the biggest event this week was not Her Majesty’s visit to the US, nor even the penultimate, dolorous station on Mr Blair’s Way of the Cross, but the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, an unabashed Americophile, to the Elysée Palace in Paris.

Having endured years of Gallic disdain, contempt and hostility, America is getting used to the happy possibility that France might actually be a friend and even an ally again.

It was widely noted in Washington that Mr Sarkozy made a point of reaching out in his victory speech to “nos amis Americains” in his victory speech. Mr Sarkozy has spent time in Washington and actually went out of his way to get close to President Bush, something most American politicians these days are not eager to do. While not endorsing the Iraq war, he attacked President Jacques Chirac’s clumsy handling of the opposition to it. He admires America’s economic dynamism and wants to inject some of that famous creative energy to an ossifying French economy.

How appropriate that, on the very day the English monarch was visiting her former colonies, the French people may just have chosen their most pro-American leader since the Marquis de Lafayette arrived to help George Washington to finish off the Redcoats at Yorktown.

Americans like not only Mr Sarkozy’s avowed Atlanticism, they like what he says about the global struggle against Islamist fanaticism. In his acceptance speech, the French President-elect also promised to work for liberty to the tyrannised people of the Middle East. He is viewed in Washington as one of the few Europeans who genuinely understands the nature and scale of the threat in Europe and elsewhere posed by Islamism. They know he won’t be sending French troops to Iraq but they like the fact that he seeks actively to align himself with the US and Israel in the long struggle against freedom’s enemies.

Fred Thompson, the actor-politician in whom much of the diminished Republican hope for the presidency next year resides, marked this new mood in a powerful encomium to the French leader in the conservative National Review this week. It was safe, he suggested, for American conservatives to start eating French fries again: “I think this would be a good time to toast Monsieur Sarkozy. And if you’re going to use wine for that toast, make it French wine.”

It’s easily forgotten, in the popular miasma of Bush hatred, how badly successive French governments and American presidents have got on. Senator Hillary Clinton would find Mr Sarkozy a much better interlocutor and ally than her husband ever did Jacques Chirac. But it’s also easy to forget that Franco-American friendship goes way back – further, dare we say it, than the Anglo-American alliance. From Montesquieu and Jefferson, through the Statue of Liberty to the liberation of Paris, by way of Tocqueville and Hemingway, the relationship has long been warm.

For Britain, about to change leaders too, there’s a challenge in this sudden change. Much of the British commentariat – and most of his party – wants Gordon Brown to put water between himself and an unpopular America. But if he does so, will an eager French government slide comfortably into the still warm seat in the White House reserved for America’s closest friend? There are certainly some in Washington these days who are investing higher expectations in Mr Sarkozy than they are in a new British government – either Mr Brown’s or, in a couple of years, perhaps David Cameron’s.

It will surely all end in tears, of course. Like many a French love affair, this latest assignation seems destined to break someone’s heart. And Americans will in time discover that the dull reliability of dour Scottish presbyterians or slippery English Tories still requites better than the mellifluous pledges of clever French reformers.

But for now the Queen has gone home and Tony Blair is waving goodbye. And the ever-optimistic Americans are learning to say cheerio and bienvenu.

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