Barack Obama has at last granted Gordon Brown a formal one-to-one meeting as the two men try to play down reports of a rift in their relations.

The Prime Minister will be given his meeting at 4pm today (9pm BST) following the G20 summit in Pittsburgh.

Obama is expected to use the occasion to make a forthright attack on the reporting in British media of Mr Brown’s attempts to arrange a meeting amid reports that the White House – angered by the release of the Lockerbie bomber – repeatedly turned down requests for a formal encounter.

The two men put on a show of friendship for the cameras in New York yesterday as part of the damage limitation exercise after the White House described reports of a snub as “totally

“I think this is a media-generated bunch of silliness,” said Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s spokesman.

Neither side denied, however, that British officials made repeated efforts to secure a formal meeting before Mr Brown arrived in the United States this week, nor that Mr Obama and the Prime Minister had held a private conversation in a UN kitchen.

The united front put on by White House and Downing Street officials was undermined by a former Foreign Office minister, Lord Malloch-Brown, who told the BBC that Mr Brown’s aides should not have been “so desperate”.

The former UN official said that the release of the Libyan Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted for his part in the Lockerbie bombing, ad affected relations: “Obviously the whole Lockerbie thing went down like a very cold shower in the US, there is no getting around it,” he said,

For his part, Lord Mandelson dismissed coverage of Mr Brown’s US visit as “personality-driven rumour-mongering”.

“I’ve been in Downing Street once or twice over the last few days, and I have not seen any such frantic activity, nor do I detect it in New York either.”

Earlier today, Mr Brown and Mr Obama held a joint press conference with President Sarkozy of France to announce that Iran had built a secret nuclear facility in a mountain and threaten tighter sanctions if it does not come into line with UN demands that it stop enriching uranium.

Isn’t this funny, Obama won’t meet with British officials over Lockerbee but will give taxpayer money to Ghadafi!  HYPOCRITS!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6849320.ece