Gordon Brown flew home from the US yesterday having ensured that his meetings with President Bush featured neither substantial splits nor needless glitz.

An American public used to seeing Tony Blair strutting the world-stage in a shower of stardust will have been left in little doubt that a very different personality now occupies No 10. The Prime Minister’s visit was not long on levity. He told NBC in an interview broadcast last night: “I didn’t come into politics to be a personality in the sense of appearing on television. It’s not the public profile that interests me, it’s getting on with the job of work.”

When it was suggested that Mr Brown and his predecessor were often compared with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the Prime Minister gruffly replied: “It depends what you think Lennon did and McCartney did.”

The interviewer then pursued human interest by asking how Mr Brown had coped with the death of his baby daughter and the illness of his young son. “I don’t really talk about it, because what Sarah and I do is get up in the morning and feel happy we have got two sons who are doing very well and we want to get on with the challenges in life,” he replied. “Being a good father is the most important thing.”

Despite the President’s efforts at Monday’s press conference to recreate the first-name-terms ambience of his relationship with Mr Blair, the new Prime Minister repeatedly referred to his host as “Mr President”.

“Cordial but not friendly,” was The Washington Post’s verdict on the Camp David summit. “Allies, if not buddies,” said the headline in The New York Times. But one British official said that when the two leaders met in private “it really was quite warm”.

Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institute in Washington, noted that Mr Brown was adopting a lower profile in the US. “Blair was a very visible leader here,” he said. “There was once a view that he could deliver George Bush’s view to the world – but in English. The trouble was that even when it was translated, the world didn’t want to hear it.”

In New York to address the UN, Mr Brown said the world was facing campaigns by “al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists” bent on destroying life and wrecking countries’ infrastructures. In his speech to the General Assembly he pressed nations, businesses and individuals to back ambitious plans to revive a stalled global development plan.

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