Perhaps the cruellest part of the electoral process in Britain is the haste with which a sitting prime minister is turfed out of office after his party’s defeat in a general election. The removal vans are at the back door of 10 Downing Street less than 24 hours after the polls have closed.

In America the outgoing leader makes a more dignified exit. It takes 11 long weeks from the election to the moment when he walks off into the sunset on Inauguration Day, January 20. But that lengthy period is not simply a means to save the blushes of an outgoing leader and allow him to take time to say his farewells. The transition process that George Bush and Barack Obama began yesterday with an apparently cordial meeting at the White House is a crucial period that can contribute greatly to the success or failure of the first year of the new president’s term.

The transition is always easiest when an outgoing president is leaving at the end of the maximum two terms in office, as President Bush is, even if he is handing over to the opposite party. Though last week’s election was clearly a repudiation of Mr Bush, the President and his team have had time to prepare for this process with the minimum of acrimony and the indications are that he intends to play as constructive a role as possible to ensure a smooth handover.

He will doubtless have been at least partly influenced by his own, less than ideal transfer into office eight years ago. Because of the Florida recount battle after the 2000 election almost half the usual transition period was lost. That meant an even more frantic dash in the remaining five and a half weeks to get appointments in place, ensure the new team was properly briefed and get a policy programme running.

The previous transition, in 1992, wasn’t much of a success, either. Bill Clinton squandered much of the 11-week period in a characteristically ill-disciplined and self-absorbed period of free-flowing reflection and public debate, only belatedly coming to terms with the basic practicalities of taking over from the first President Bush.

That error led almost directly to a chaotic start to his presidency, which opened with a messy fight over his proposal to allow gays to serve in the military and the failure in scandal of not one but two nominees for attorney-general.

At least that handover was cordial, even if it did take place at a time of economic uncertainty.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter, it was clear from the moment that the two met at the White House after the election that this was going to be a difficult and unproductive transition, at a time of continuing national crisis.

President Carter, of course, had been defeated after just one term in office by the man he now had to work with and, during the campaign, he had made no secret of his disdain for his opponent.

Their White House meeting was far from cordial and was described by aides (with a certain amount of glee) as frosty at times. Both sides leaked stories about it: aides to Mr Carter suggested that Nancy Reagan had more or less asked the Carters to leave early so that she could redecorate, while Mr Reagan’s people told the press that he had declined to play along with Mr Carter’s efforts to treat the meeting as something of a tutorial for the president-elect.

The chilled quality to that transition was made much worse by the continuing diplomatic efforts by the Carter Administration to secure the return of the American hostages held by Iranian students for more than 400 days. Mr Carter was desperate to leave office after a fairly disastrous presidency with at least that accomplishment. In the event, the Iranian revolutionary Government held the hostages until a few minutes after he left office, giving the incoming President an apparent early foreign policy achievement that would set the tone for his eight years in office.

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