According to the programme it was Denise Lewis, gold medal heptathlete at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, who bore the flaming torch into Downing Street yesterday. But it was impossible to tell; she was completely obscured by security.

With more than 1,000 chanting demonstrators lining Whitehall, far outnumbering any curious members of the public who might have turned out in the cold and occasional snow for a small lunchtime spectacle, police decided to take no chances outside the heavy gates to the Gordon Brown official residence.

They were there in every known guise: helicopter police, mounted police, motorcycle police, bicycling police, Ford Transit van police, standing police, wrestle-you-to-the-ground police in black Andy Pandy suits, and even jogging police.

When Ms Lewis – if indeed it were she – made her way down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square she was somewhere in the middle of a fat phalanx of perspiring bodyguards running at sub-Olympic speed to shield her on all sides. Half were the Met’s finest in their yellow reflective jackets; the rest were Chinese minders in pale blue Beijing Olympics tracksuits.

Across the street, corralled by a double line of crush barriers and at least 100 police, the protesters were loud and vociferous in their condemnation of China’s treatment of Tibet, and of Gordon Brown for having anything to do with the day’s stunt, which has its origins in the 1936 Berlin Olympics when Hitler thought that giving the torch a bit of a preliminary run around the streets might add a touch of glory to the Third Reich.

The protesters flew Tibetan prayer flags and chanted “China shame” loudly and repeatedly, occasionally punctuated with, “Shame on you, Gordon Brown”. Some waved pictures of the Dalai Lama, others hoisted placards bearing messages from the stark “Stop the killing in Tibet”, “Flame of Shame” and “No Torch to Tibet” to the sweetly reasonable: “The Dalai Lama is a living Gandhi. Talk to him now.” Others had jumped on the bandwagon. Sharing the barricades with the Tibet protesters were a fair few more shouting their disgust for China’s support of dictatorship in Burma and of the current regime in Sudan which they say has permitted massacre and starvation in Darfur province.

They had been warming up for a good hour undeterred by the occasional light snow flurry. When the torch eventually arrived a handful managed to vault the barriers but were swiftly brought down by the Andy Pandy police in tackles that would have done credit to the England rugby pack.

No one, however, appeared to have been hurt. Except Kate Hoey, the Labour MP and former Sports Minister, who was very hurt indeed that the Prime Minister should be receiving the flame on the steps of No 10.

“I have been supporting the Tibetan people, and opposing the Government of China for reneging on what they promised when Beijing won the Olympics bid; they have not improved their human rights at all,” Ms Hoey said. “Gordon Brown should not be taking a high profile in this. The whole Olympic torch movement has been hijacked by the Chinese Government, and the torch itself is now tainted by the blood of ordinary Tibetans.” As the crowd behind her surged forward at the impending arrival of the tainted torch, Ms Hoey had to be lifted over the crush barrier by a fellow protester for her own safety.

Many Buddhists of various nationalities were among the crowd, but the protester in the Savile Row dark overcoat was clearly home-grown. Shantiprabha, a Buddhist monk from Oxford, said he was demonstrating not just in support of the Tibetans but also the Chinese people. “The Government of China is getting a lot of positive PR from the Games but we need to look at what they are doing to their own people and they need to earn some credibility in that respect.”

A hundred yards up Whitehall the police had shepherded all pro-Chinese demonstrators, who were far outnumbered by the protesters, into their own pen, which they had festooned with Beijing 2008 banners.

Vincent Sun from Shanghai, who is working in Britain as a service engineer, said: “I am here to support the Beijing Olympic Games and the most important thing in the world is to have one China with Tibet as one part of China.”

The irony may have been lost on them that they were positioned outside the Banqueting House on the very spot where Charles I lost his head in 1649 for a perceived arrogant disregard for the democratic process.

Yesterday was a difficult day for the torch. Before it reached Whitehall protesters had tried unsucessfuly to wrest it from the hands of Konnie Huq, the former Blue Peter presenter as she ran with it through West London. There were several attempts to board the official bus accompanying it, and as the flame passed through Holland Park two more protesters armed with fire extinguishers attempted to put it out. It stayed alight, like those magic birthday candles you can’t blow out.

The Olympic flame is supposed to commemorate the theft of fire by Prometheus from Zeus. Yesterday’s events suggested that the fire had been stolen from noble sport by base politics.