Barack Obama's speech failed to live up to his own high standards

Perhaps Mr Obama was smothered also by his audience, which remained stubbornly unresponsive. For most of the time the President had nothing to bounce off: no applause and certainly no shouts of praise or blame as might be heard in an American church or at an American political rally.

The presidential text sounded as if it had been worked on so hard and conscientiously by a vast team of helpers that it had lost all savour, and been reduced to a series of orotund banalities, of the sort which can be heard at every tedious Anglo-American conference: “Profound challenges stretch out before us…the time for our leadership is now…Our alliance will remain indispensable.”

It did not help to hear Mr Obama assert, after only a minute or two, that “fortunately it’s been smooth sailing” between Britain and the United States “ever since” 1812, when we burned down the White House. Everyone present will have been able to think of occasions when this was not so. Suez did not seem like plain sailing.

Applause did break out when Mr Obama observed that “it’s possible for the sons and daughters of former colonies” to sit as Members of Parliament, and for “the grandson of a Kenyan who served as a cook in the British Army to stand before you as the President of the United States”.

Here was a personal connection rather than a platitude. We warm to Mr Obama, and feel an affinity with him, in part because he is a grandson of the British Empire. As well as being an American, he is one of us. And like many Americans, he has a generous appreciation of the tradition of liberty on this side of the Atlantic: hence his references to Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, Adam Smith and Winston Churchill.