After arriving in Britain, US President Barack Obama wasted little time before jumping into the country's hottest topic of debate, whether the UK should quit the European Union. The President's view was clear - Britain's strongest inside the EU.
U.S. President Barack Obama's three-day stopover in the U.K. began with a call on the queen, a day after she celebrated her 90th birthday.
The President perhaps relishing the fact that the British monarch is in public at least famously apolitical, and lunch with the Royal Family would steer clear of controversy.
However, once on the steps of No.10 Downing Street, the UK Prime Minister's official residence, the gloves came off and it was down to the notorious bare knuckle fighting of British politics.
Stay in the EU urged President Obama, it makes Britain bigger and stronger.
"Maybe some point down the line there might be a UK-U.S. trade agreement but that is not going to happen any time soon because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc - the European Union, to get a trade agreement done. And the UK is going to be in the back of the queue," Obama said.
Britain gives its verdict on membership of the 28-nation trading bloc in two months, a referendum called by Prime Minister David Cameron to silence a growing UK anger at EU bureaucracy and immigration from eastern Europe.
But politically, referendums are risky and support from a U.S. President would be welcome.
For those like London Mayor Boris Johnson campaigning to leave the Union's half a billion strong marketplace, President Obama's intervention has been dubbed hypocritical.
"I do think it's perverse. We're being urged by the United States to embroil ourselves ever more deeply in a system where our laws, 60 percent of them are now emanating from the EU when the United States would not dream of subjugating itself in any way to any other international jurisdiction," Johnson said.
That he's shortly handing over the reins of power will have been one reason the U.S. President felt free to wade into this hotly-contested EU debate in Britain.
Whether it helps is a matter voters here see it, as the London Mayor clearly does, as unwarranted meddling.
