For all the gaffes by the President in not being able to pronounce Rishi Sunak’s name or get his title correct, it is obvious that Joe Biden and the Prime Minister shared a friendly rapport during this week’s White House meeting.
But more than that it did not pass experienced political watchers in Washington DC that the Prime Minister seemed to happily embrace the liberal agenda of so-called Bidenomics whether it was on economic intervention, taxes, LGBT issues, Net Zero or all the rest.
As the White House correspondent added: “He embraced [the] Biden liberal agenda.”
That is not to say people were not impressed.
“He was so polished today, impecaable, really impressive. Optics 100 percent,” was one remark.
But it was not so much who he did meet as who he chose to shun which told Americans all they need to know about Sunak.
The avoidance of Donald Trump whose legal issues exploded again last night, was the most noticeable snub.
Trump, despite the courtroom battles, still looks the most likely person to become President next year although nothing is certain.
But Sunak was obviously keen to avoid him.
The Prime Minister also notably went on the liberal platform to be interviewed – CNN – rather than the more conservative one Fox News.
The Prime Minister was less than enthusiastic about the previous President and any prospect of him returning to the White House.
On the CNN interview he insisted that the “special relationship” between the UK. and US would endure “regardless of who is sitting in these various jobs, and that’s because the values between our two countries are so aligned that we see the world instinctively in the same way”.
But one issue where Trump is definitely not on the same page as the Prime Minister is clearly troubling and that is Ukraine and whether a Republican President will continue to pour money into the war.
Pressed on Trump’s more compromising comments on the war in Ukraine (he has consistantly refused to say whether Ukraine should win), Mr Sunak ducked.
He replied that “obviously, it wouldn’t be right for me to comment on domestic politics here” but he claimed that he had detected “strong support for the efforts that America is putting in to support Ukraine” at his meetings with both Republicans and Democrats.
That is not so clear with the pro-Trump freedom caucus in Congress currently preventing any votes going through and hamstringing the Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
In fact, the one Republican that Sunak met was McCarthy who is in the midst of political turmoil with a divided party in the House of Representatives.
McCarthy is the most senior Republican at the moment but he is also the face of the Republican establishment which is looking increasingly detatched from its party base made up of MAGA (Make America Great Again) Trump supporters.
The parallels back home with the grassroots of the Conservative Party rising up and supporting Boris Johnson in the form of the Conservative Democratic Organisation was hard to avoid.
But when it came to engaging with serious conservative voices in Washington Sunak gave it a hard pass.
His predecessors have been made welcome at the Heritage Foundation – probably the most influential thinktank in America – which is currently setting up the policies and staffing for the next Republican White House administration.
Heritage have been very critical of Sunak’s “socialist” policies particularly on tax and did not invite him to speak.
But it is equally fair to say that Sunak was not exactly beating down their door to come in.
Much better attending a Washington Nationals baseball game and failing to make a pitch of any sort.
The conclusion, though, is that it seems likely that Sunak may privately be hoping for a Biden victory. He may struggle with a Republican president even one that is not Trump because he is so far away from being a conservative.
That at least was the takeaway for political observers in DC.
It is slightly ironic given Biden’s previous hostility to the UK and the way he treated Sunak to a brief meeting in Northern Ireland – the infamous bilatte in a coffee shop.
But perhaps both understand that their role in getting rid of unpredictable big personalities – Boris Johnson and Donald Trump – and their shared liberal establishment agenda makes them unlikely allies.
