VS                              

The mortification. Gordon Brown arrives with beautiful, historic and thoughtful gifts for the president, and Barack Obama offers the prime minister a lousy box of DVDs. In other words, not only is the president making war on our institutions, he is deeply, crashingly, embarassingly etiquette-challenged.. And so is his wife. These are faux pas (pl.) for the books. Here are some of the cringe-making stories.

Note: I have to hand it to the prime minister for giving Churchill-dissing Obama the perfectly targeted dig with the gift of the complete set of the official Churchill biography by Martin Gilbert.