Barack Obama’s rejection of a bust of Winston Churchill and off-handed treatment of Prime Minister Gordon Brown were all over the news during the weekend.

There seems to be more to all this than the explanations that Barack Obama was tired, or simply too distracted by the domestic economic crisis to pay attention to protocol (or to arrange for a gift more appropriate than a set of DVDs from Blockbuster).

Obama seems to bear an actual animus toward Great Britain, which not even the presence in office of the current Labourite regime is able to soften.

The Telegraph elicited a very revealing State Department response.

The real views of many in Obama administration were laid bare by a State Department official involved in planning the Brown visit, who reacted with fury when questioned by The Sunday Telegraph about why the event was so low-key.

The official dismissed any notion of the special relationship, saying: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”