When President Biden arrives in Britain tomorrow, much pomp and circumstance will be rolled out to make him welcome.

Nobody will mention the fact that he did not come to our first Coronation since 1953. He slighted Charles and Camilla by sending Jill Biden, the First Lady, instead. Was that a petty act of revenge for their refusal to give him pride of place at the late Queen’s funeral?

As a guest at Windsor on Monday, we may be certain that the President will be warmly greeted by the King and Queen, and the meeting is being viewed as an olive branch offering on behalf of Biden. Joe will turn on his folksy charm and crack a joke and Charles will chuckle politely.

Rishi Sunak will be cordial too, even though the King’s octogenarian guest has the devil of a time getting his name right.

So far, the Prime Minister’s diplomacy has made little impression in the Biden White House. Luckily we don’t play cricket with the Americans.

There is the usual waffle in our media about the “Special Relationship”. Across the Atlantic, the President’s visit will be treated merely as a stopover en route to the Nato summit at Vilnius, the real purpose of his trip.

Vilnius will take place amid the fallout from a Telegraph scoop. Biden is reported to have chosen Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission President, in preference to Ben Wallace, our doughty Defence Secretary, to succeed the Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg as secretary general of Nato.

Mrs von der Leyen, the EU’s most powerful official, emerged as the unlikely candidate after Nato allies failed to agree on a successor.

The US President, who traditionally gifts the alliance’s top civilian role to Europe, sees her as a candidate its 31 member states can all get behind.

Her transatlantic outlook has seen Mrs von der Leyen shun shoddy European intelligence led by her native Germany and France, which misjudged Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for advice by US spymasters.