It was Vincent Cable who first noticed Gordon Brown's remarkable transformation from Stalin to Mr Bean, "creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos".
But when your luck's not in your luck's not in, and I can't help but think it takes a quite spectacular comedy of errors to allow the opportunity of being the first European leader invited to the Obama White House to be written up as snub and to allow some last-minute preening on the plane to be snapped by the hordes of waiting photographers. It wouldn't have happened in Alastair Campbell's day.
Whatever could the prime minister be thinking?
