British diplomats can be relied upon to provide a laconic put-down. Tony Blair, said one, is now in "liability territory". The liability is George W Bush. The territory is London.
The state visit of the 43rd president of the United States was agreed in June 2002, two months after Blair and Bush had secretly decided, at their summit in Crawford, Texas, to fight shoulder to shoulder to remove Saddam Hussein. That was a time of shared optimism. Together they would make the world a more democratic place and they would be thanked on the streets of Baghdad and across the world for their pains.
Bush's two previous visits here (that compares with Blair's five so far to the US) have been low-key - Chequers in summer 2001 and Hillsborough in Northern Ireland at the start of the war. His main advisers, Karl Rove, Andrew Card and Condoleezza Rice, wanted something bigger to "celebrate" the war effort and boost his re-election chances. Blair was happy to oblige.
Eighteen months ago, after all, the prospect of a serious Democratic challenge seemed remote and the British assumed that Bush was a shoo-in for a second term. The option of a state visit was available (plans to lay on something similar for Bill Clinton in 1998 having been scaled down because of the Lewinsky affair), so Bush's people seized their chance.
That was then. For all Blair's strained attempts to justify his "proximity strategy" with Washington, behind the scenes relations are not what they were. Even before the war began in March, the British tried hard to impress upon the Americans the need to prepare for post-Saddam Iraq, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bush's announcement in October - six months later - that Rice would take charge of reconstruction (something that should have been her job in the first place) led to ironic cheers in Downing Street.
Both Blair and Jack Straw have tried to broaden the arguments. In his speech at the Lord Mayor's banquet on 10 November, the Prime Minister made another attempt to append his notion of "humanitarian intervention" to the neoconservative visions of American primacy. He described Iraq as "the battle of seminal importance for the early 21st century" that would "define relations between the Muslim world and the west". He inveighed against "anti-Americanism", using the catch-all to mask the hostility of much of his country not to the US in general, but to the Bush administration in particular.
The Foreign Office takes a slightly different tack. Visiting Washington on 12 November, Jack Straw praised the more moderate and discreet approach of the US State Department. Straw's officials acknowledge points of discord but remind people of areas where US involvement has paid dividends, such as putting Slobodan Milosevic on trial in The Hague and supporting human rights tribunals in Sierra Leone and Rwanda.
Blair, for all his talk of the trip coming at "exactly the right time", was so concerned that he involved himself deeply in the planning. The itinerary was negotiated with the US administration and Buckingham Palace right up to the last minute. Bush is being exposed to the public as little as possible, confining his appearances to places such as Westminster Abbey, the Guildhall, the US embassy and the ambassador's residence. The joint press conference on 20 November has been pared down to prepared statements and a couple of questions each.
Bush's team put pressure on No 10 and the Foreign Office to ensure that the anticipated tens of thousands of demonstrators are kept out of the view of Bush and the US television networks. Whitehall mandarins shuffle in embarrassment. "The one thing you do not ask your friends in Downing Street, by way of small talk, is how the preparations for Bush are going," said one.
As the visit is hosted by the Queen, the political talks between Blair and Bush will be brief. This matches Blair's lowered expectations of the relationship. When his people go to Washington now, they find the likes of Rove, Card and Rice focused on the re-election campaign to the exclusion of almost everything else. Their strategy is, according to one official, to "take the politics out of Iraq", to confine it to a security issue. When they do talk about it, even with their British "friends", they go into "party-line optimism". Other foreign policy questions are seen purely through the electoral prism. Any hopes Blair might have had to restart work on the road map in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been put back until 2005.
The two main areas of disagreement now are Iran and Europe. The Americans have never been comfortable with British policy towards Tehran and were miffed by Blair's display of independence when he joined the French and the Germans in sending the Iranians their own warning about nuclear ambitions, along with incentives to comply. John Bolton, a deputy US secretary of state, mocked the European policy of carrots and sticks, declaring: "I don't do carrots."
Meanwhile, American concern about collective European security has flared up again. "It's like a disease," says a British diplomat. "It is never cured. It had been in remission, but now it's back and they've got all steamed up again." The cause was a meeting in Berlin in September involving Blair, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder, when the three discussed pushing forward plans for a European defence body. British efforts to reassure the Americans that Schroder's aides had "over-briefed" and that any new arrangement would not rival Nato were only moderately successful.
Within hours of Bush heading home on 21 November, he will probably have forgotten the visit. That will not be so easy for Blair. In the same week, the row over foundation hospitals returns to the Commons. A rebellion over tuition fees looms and, within weeks, Lord Hutton will deliver his report on the Kelly affair.
Bush's contribution to Blair - after everything Blair has done for him - will be to have reawakened conflicts of old and presaged conflicts of the future.
