The second race for the White House begins now, as Gordon Brown jostles with other leaders to get to the ear of the President-elect. Barack Obama’s best campaign joke remains the quip that “Contrary to the rumours you have heard, I was not born in a manger”. That does not stop other leaders from getting their frankincense ready, though, if that is the price of an early audience.

Britain’s best cards are the Prime Minister’s new standing as an economic manager, followed by military support for the US in Afghanistan and Iraq — past and future — and a common interest in Pakistan. In the Middle East, in dealing with Iran and Russia, and in climate change Britain has plenty to offer.

It will be competing for pole position with France and Germany, however, now that the rifts between those countries and the US over Iraq are firmly in the past. Early thoughts of an extensive joint European approach to Mr Obama look like fraying in the eagerness to be first and best.

But ministers know that invitations from the Obama team will come at a price. Easiest to foresee is the request, bordering on a demand, for more troops in Afghanistan and, with a pointed look at Germany, for fewer restrictions on what they can do. That counts as real pressure; no one wants to be the first to say no to Mr Obama.

Listening to British officials since Tuesday it is striking how they do not, this time, presume on a close relationship with the President-elect, never mind a special one. The calculation with which they discuss what Britain has to offer reveals the intensity of the international competition for face time with Mr Obama.

You almost never hear the “special” phrase in Washington, anyway, only in London. In the “change has come” world of Mr Obama it sounds antique, even offensive in its clamminess, asking for special treatment because of the tugs of the past. The Obama crowd has grown up with the global intimacy of the internet, and their own claim to history is to have shattered the prejudices of the past.

Nor are there many who would see Mr Obama as an Anglophile by reflex. There are flickers in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, of dislike of Britain in its Kenyan colonial mode.

The sourest comes with the discovery of the Kenyan papers of his grandfather, a cook and domestic servant, which recorded his appearance as “Complexion: dark. Nose: flat. Mouth: large. Hair: curly. Teeth: six missing”, and included an employment reference that he was “unsuitable and certainly not worth 60 shillings per month”.

The political rebirth of Mr Brown this autumn is the bare minimum for securing British influence in the White House.

No new president is going to waste his time on a leader who might be out of office in months. The perception, however, that Mr Brown has made some decisions on the banking rescue better and more quickly than the Bush Administration will also help to solidify the position of Britain as a close ally, as finance and the economy dwarf all other claims on Mr Obama’s time.

The problem for other leaders, however, is that most of the tough economic decisions for Mr Obama will lead him into the thickets of domestic politics. On trade, British officials find it hard to hope that the product of Mr Obama, plus a Democrat Congress, plus a recession, is anything but protectionism.

Britain has recently said that it does not intend to put more troops into Afghanistan. It will surely have to reverse that because Mr Obama will ask for more help from Nato before the April summit. The demands will be even more difficult to meet if Iraq stumbles in its all-too-recent progress.

As of July the US was spending $9.9 billion (£6.2 billion) a month on Iraq, and $2.4 billion on Afghanistan, according to the non-partisan Congressional Research Office. Mr Obama is bound to use the glamour of his triumph and the power of his office to try to persuade would-be allies to pick up the burden.

Views of Empire

“. . . not all the tourists in Nairobi had come for the wildlife. Some came because Kenya, without shame, offered to recreate an age when the lives of whites in foreign lands rested comfortably on the backs of darker races . . .”

After talking to a young British student on an aircraft, who spoke of the “poor buggers” in “these Godforsaken countries”:“Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose . . . Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a black American, might naturally share in his dim view of Africa.”

“The railway had been the single largest engineering effort in the history of the British Empire at the time it was built — six hundred miles long, from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean to the eastern shores of Lake Victoria. The project took five years to complete as well as the lives of several hundred imported Indian workers. When it was finished, the British realised there were no passengers to help defray the costs of their conceit.”

From Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

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