Britain wants President Obama to put a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill back in the Oval Office, where it stood for the past eight years as a symbol of an enduring special relationship with America. The White House is not so sure.

Shortly before Mr Obama’s inauguration, the Jacob Epstein bronze is understood to have been removed and placed in storage by White House curators. Recent photographs show that a bust of Abraham Lincoln, one of the new President’s heroes, has been moved to take the position once occupied by Churchill.

The bronze was lent to George Bush by Tony Blair in 2001 from the Government Art Collection for the duration of his presidency. It is now due to be returned.

However, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said yesterday: “We have made it clear that we would be pleased to extend the loan should Mr Obama so wish.” He added that no response had been received; yesterday the White House declined to comment.

The fate of the bust inevitably will be laden with more historic significance than other decisions the President makes as he mulls over redecoration plans, such as getting rid of Mr Bush’s collection of decorative plates.

In his last Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech, Gordon Brown sought to reinforce relations with Mr Obama by a reference to Britain’s wartime leader. “Winston Churchill described the joint inheritance of Britain and America as not just a shared history but a shared belief in the great principles of freedom, and the rights of Man – of what Barack Obama described in his election night speech as the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope,” the Prime Minister said.

Mr Obama shows little evidence of the Anglophilia that led his predecessors to pepper speeches with quotations from Churchill. Instead, there have been suggestions that he has reason to disdain the former Prime Minister. In 1952 Churchill declared the Kenya emergency in the homeland of Mr Obama’s father, sending in troops to crush the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule. Among the Kenyans who were detained without trial and allegedly tortured by the British was Hussein Onyango Obama, the President’s grandfather.

Tristram Hunt, the British historian, said: “Bush saw the special relationship through the prism of Churchill as a war leader. But there are other traditions, of nonconformism and antiimperialism, running through Anglo-American history which represent a very different vision of global power to that of Churchill and Bush.”

He suggested that Britain lend Mr Obama the depiction of Hope painted by the Victorian artist George Frederick Watts, or another work to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s death. The British-born pamphleteer, one of the “fathers of the American Revolution”, was extensively quoted in the President’s inaugural address last week.

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