The doors of President Obama's Administration are swinging wide open for British Conservatives amid a growing realisation from the White House downwards that its ideological allies in the Labour Party may be losing their grip on power.

George Osborne today returned home from a three-day visit to Washington where he held meetings with Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers, director of the White House economic council.

The Shadow Chancellor also had formal talks with Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, World Bank President Robert Zoellick and IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as well as using his attendance at the White House correspondents' dinner on Saturday night to speak to Mr Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

Despite having once declared himself to be "a signed-up, card-carrying Bush fan", Mr Osborne said he was now on "good terms" with a series of senior figures in Mr Obama's team that cut across any political differences.

In contrast to the frost which greeted visiting Tories in recent years when relations in successive administrations with Tony Blair were intensely warm, Mr Osborne's team was able to set up these latest talks with relative ease.

"We have established links with the Republican Party and they will continue," he said. "But we have also made an effort to get to know the new Democratic Administration. David Cameron has met Barack Obama twice - as have I because I was present for those meetings - and part of the purpose of this trip was to ensure we had good relations with people like Tim Geithner and Larry Summers."

Mr Summers is one of Gordon Brown's closest political friends and he has been particularly critical of European leaders refusing to back plans for a bigger international economic stimulus package. Aides said, however, that Conservative opposition to any form of stimulus spending in Britain was scarcely even raised in Mr Osborne's meeting on Friday.

A White House source has separately told The Times that there is now a general expectation that the Conservatives will win the next election and “we will have to do business with them".

The Shadow Chancellor, who has always maintained an interest in the US political process, dispatched officials to watch Mr Obama during the primary campaign and believes that a similarly powerful message of change can be imported to Britain for the next election.

"We hope and intend to be the next government within the year," Mr Osborne said. "And we're keen to learn from them some of the lessons about moving from opposition into government from the first 100 days. We want to know about how they prepared for that."

In a further sign that the political and diplomatic pendulum is swinging back towards the Tories, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, Britain's Ambassador to Washington - who will hope to survive any change of government back in London - staged a full dinner in Mr Osborne's honour during the visit.

A spokesman for the Embassy said Foreign Office guidelines allowed ambassadors to "offer hospitality" to visiting members of the opposition front bench and had previously done so with Baroness Neville-Jones, a shadow security minister.

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