Gordon Brown’s visit to Israel has been largely eclipsed by the impending arrival of Barack Obama, the possible future leader of the Jewish state’s most powerful ally, and by a domestic political scandal that has riveted the nation.

The unfortunate timing has meant that Mr Brown’s words of solidarity with Israel and his warnings that it must curb its settlement activity have all but been overlooked here.

While the Israeli government warmly applauded Mr Brown’s stern warnings to its main regional enemy, Tehran, the country is busily gearing up for the Democratic presidential candidate’s arrival from Iraq, Afghanistan and Jordan before he heads on to Europe. One leading Israeli newspaper noted that Mr Brown was being “treated as a warm-up act for Obama”.

But the Prime Minister’s brief sojourn also coincided with a new episode in the political sleaze scandal that has engulfed Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister. Mr Olmert’s lawyers have for four days been cross examining a key witness in the investigation into allegation bribes given to the Israeli leader over a dozen years before he occupied his current office.

In a harsh grilling, the witness, a 75-year-old American businessman named Morris Talansky has insisted that he slipped the prime minister $150,000 dollars in cash stuffed into envelopes that was meant as campaign donations but which he said Mr Olmert may have used to indulge his appetite for luxury hotels, first-class travel and fine cigars.

While Mr Olmert’s lawyers attempted to reveal a number of inconsistencies in the American’s story, the Prime Minister is still clinging to his political career by his fingernails, facing party primaries in the coming months and the threat of an indictment on the testimony of his former business associate, Uri Messer.

In addition, one of Israel’s leading newspapers today published a transcript of a police interrogation of Mr Olmert, in which the premier hinted at financial collusion with Mr Talansky during business trips to the United States.

"It may well be that during those trips, in the few times Talansky... asked me to appear before a certain body or organisation he was interested in, then he was charged to cover part of the expenses," Mr Olmert is quoted as having told investigators.

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