Gordon Brown rested his head at Camp David last night and he will sleep in New York City this evening. This schedule will spare him the indignity of having to snooze at Blair House – the normal residence for a visiting Head of Government in Washington, DC (named after a politically influential 19th-century newspaper editor, not a recently departed Prime Minister) – and this will not be the only way in which his hosts will surely indulge him. There will be no mention of the dog whistle signals that Mr Brown has allowed to be sent about enjoying a less imtimate relationship with the Bush Administration. All will be smiles.

This does not mean that those earlier signs will be entirely forgotten. It was exceptionally unwise of Lord Malloch-Brown, one of the supposed “talents” recruited by the Prime Minister, to brag about his unpopularity with neo-conservatives in a newspaper interview and, on deeper reflection, Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, might regret a speech which he delivered in the American capital this month, sections of which sounded like Senator Barack Obama without the charisma. The Prime Minister should not indulge antiAmericanism.

Mr Brown would protest that there is not an anti-American bone in his body, that his frequent private visits to the United States over the years illustrate the affection and admiration that he has for America and that few of his predecessors have had his Atlanticist credentials.

All of which is true but not the complete story. Mr Brown has a passion for a certain sort of America. He applauds its entrepreneurial ethos while being less sure about whether he cares for individual American capitalists. He has spent most of his holidays in the United States in and around Cape Cod in Massachusetts, a place that is about as east coast as it is possible to be in the continental USA, culturally as well as geographically. Mr Brown has an understandable fondness for this world of clapboard bookshops and workshops at Harvard University and through his network of (Democratic) friends has become immensely knowledgeable about US politics. Yet this Kennedy country is hardly representative of the vast whole of America. Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, once remarked that Massachusetts was “the only communist country that I have been in”. He was only half-joking.

If Mr Brown is to enjoy the influence in the United States that he should, then he needs to reach out beyond the narrow corridor that runs from Boston through to Washington. In future trips, he should be ready to be seen in the booming South and the expanding mountain West and not just chic cities in California which rival Cape Cod in their atypical cosmopolitan liberalism. He has, in short, to be able to work with “red state” America (Republican) as well as the more obliging “blue state” America with which he is comfortable and familiar. The next President could easily be a Republican. Mr Brown should not place all his eggs in Hillary Clinton’s basket.

If he is seen as a bipartisan figure, then the Prime Minister can exploit his microscopic learning about the United States and its politics to his advantage with the White House and Congress. There are seminal areas of policy territory where the closest of cooperation between Britain and the United States is fundamentally important. He should not leave it long before he returns again to Washington. He might even make the supreme sacrifice of staying inside Blair House when he is next in that neighbourhood.