THE “Yo Blair” text is most surprising to me for the sweater gift. Not because George Bush accepted the woolly offering with his nicely ironic “It’s awfully thoughtful of you” (no one has ever faulted the President for his formal manners), but because Tony Blair is still giving Mr Bush gifts at all.

When I was playing “flyon-the-wall” with the pair for the Times Magazine (in those happier days when the only war was in Iraq and we were winning), one of Mr Bush’s ambitions was to end the farce of exchanging gold-wrapped boxes at meetings.

On the second day of the Hillsborough Castle summit in April 2003, after a morning on the “vital role” for the UN in Baghdad, the President saw Mr Blair coming towards him in the bedroom corridor, paused briefly as though he had forgotten something, dashed into a cupboard filled with cubes of diplomatic-packed foil and came out empty-handed with the words: “We’ve got to stop this gift business. I’ve got one here but I’m not going to give it to you. It’s a bowl.”

Mr Blair looked pleased that the “special relationship” was too special to depend any longer on top-of-the-range porcelain. But the gifts seemed to have kept coming, along with the lightly mocking undertone in the President’s “I know you picked it out yourself”.

Illusion-lovers should be grateful that we have no equivalent tapes of the gift-giving and role-seeking between Macmillan and Kennedy or Thatcher and Reagan. Both wrappings and realities have remained very much the same.

SIR PETER STOTHARD

BLAIR IS SUCH A POLITICAL CHAMELEON

MR BLAIR is the ultimate political chameleon. He changes his tone and language depending on whom he is with. So it was no surprise that he adopted some of Mr Bush’s patois.

Mr Blair believes that if only he can talk to this or that person they will be won over by his charm. As Paddy Ashdown noted in his diaries, Mr Blair “tends to say what people want to hear”.

The late Roy Jenkins compared him to Franklin Roosevelt. Both had “a great ability to enthuse those who come to see them for a half an hour. They go out thinking the world is a better place and they are a more important person than they were when they went in.”

But the political chameleon often leaves people confused. Just ask Gordon Brown what he thought Mr Blair promised at Granita in 1994.

PETER RIDDELL

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