London welcomed Donald Trump today not with anger but total indifference (and a cock and balls)

It was a carefully honed exercise in picture creation, a skin-deep day for a thin-skinned man

Transatlantic flights into the capital tend to trace the path of the Thames then bank to their final destination just beyond Tower Bridge, so it could very well have been the sight of Sadiq Khan’s office out of the Air Force One window that prompted Donald Trump to reignite his Twitter spat with the mayor of London shortly before landing at Stansted.

If it was thus, and alas we cannot know, it would barely have been a matter of seconds before London answered back, in the form of a 110ft cock and balls and the words “Oi Trump”, mowed into a suburban back garden by a student climate change activist along the flight path in Bishop’s Stortford.

Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary, was there to greet him on the runway.

And then, in what must be a new tweak to the established protocol, Jeremy Hunt appeared to remain at Stansted airport for several hours. Was he guarding the plane? Had he become hopelessly lost trying to find the Uber pick-up point? (Orange car park, row C, foreign secretary. Don’t take the ramp or it’ll take you all day.)

Who knows, but what he certainly was doing was popping up on every rolling news channel going, deftly yet bizarrely shifting the conversation on to Labour and the Peterborough by-election, a contest in which he is apparently unaware that his own party is currently polling just below the Church of the Militant Elvis.

It was, as ever, principally an aerial assault. Londoners hoping to catch a glimpse of history would have their best chance glancing skyward.

Where the president of the United States is concerned, history is made by helicopter. Then other helicopters follow, so as to keep you confused about which helicopter the history is in. Then other, less historic helicopters follow those – the TV helicopters, filming the people below as they look up at history as it flies above them.

That’s if they could be bothered.

Outside Buckingham Palace, and behind the police tape round Parliament Square, anyone troubled for a few words by the TV news crews took mere seconds to make clear they were only hanging around because they happened to be passing by, they wouldn’t be waiting long, and frankly they didn’t care.

When the presidential motorcade made its way from the palace to Westminster Abbey, about two hundred people were waiting in Parliament Square to see it. But when The Beast took an unexpected right turn into a side street shortcut, no one noticed or cared.

They just went on their way again, never entirely sure what it even was they’d been waiting for.

In the Soviet Union, it was well established wisdom that if you ever saw a queue, you just got in it. Whatever it was for, it’d be something you didn’t have, so you might as well. And so it was with the Trump crowds: there for the sake of a moment’s indifference, to while away a few minutes on a sunny afternoon.

They could hear the guns in Green Park, they could hear the Band of the Grenadier Guards, safely tucked away on private land, playing the national anthems on the Buckingham Palace lawn. The Queen walked out of a door. Prince Charles walked out of a door. The procession of royal experts walked from TV studio to TV studio, talking of an increased role for Prince Charles in the day’s walking out of doors and back in them again.

No one does it quite like the British. That’s the line the British are sticking to, anyway, and it’s OK because no one else is listening.

None of it matters, of course. It was a carefully honed, patiently crafted exercise in picture creation. But when you’re dealing with a man as substantial as a flash bulb, pictures are all that matters.

Donald Trump, there at Buckingham Palace, inspecting the troops with the Queen. How many words is that picture worth, to a man who doesn’t know a thousand of them?