Yesterday evening was an interesting exercise in "compare and contrast". It started with drinks with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, at the American ambassador’s residence in London. And then it was onto a dinner with Boris Berezovsky, former oligarch and arch enemy of Vladimir Putin.

It is striking how national loyalties kick in and override partisan disputes, once senior Americans are overseas. Mrs P is over in Europe primarily to discuss climate change. But when I suggested to her that a Democratic Party president might be a little more willing to reach an international agreement than the present incumbent of the White House, she was clearly reluctant to put the boot into George W. Bush. Yes, she agreed the Democrats are in general a bit more fired up about climate change than the Republicans. But the important thing is to identify "things we can all agree on" – Democrats and Republicans, Europeans and Americans. Unfortunately, the area of agreement she identified didn’t seem to go much beyond – "climate change is happening, it’s a big problem and something needs to be done about it."

I asked her if it was a problem that the Europeans still seem wedded to the Kyoto approach, since Kyoto is such a dirty word in Congress. She took a pragmatic approach. If you want to bring something like Kyoto back, "you would have to call it something else."

After a while the ambassador arrived to usher the speaker away for photos. We shook hands. Or rather, we didn’t.