HE has moved house to Dallas, popped down to the shops, tried out the nearest Mexican restaurant and been serenaded by a British pianist. Now it is back to work for George W Bush, the former president, who is off to Canada next weekend to begin his new career as a celebrity speaker.

Bush’s public re-emergence at a Calgary convention centre after six weeks of post-White House seclusion coincides with an unexpected shift in popular attitudes to the president who left office with some of the worst approval ratings on record.

It turns out that he may not have been quite so bad after all. “If Bush policies were disastrous, as [Barack] Obama claims, then why is he continuing them?” asked Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Several polls . . . have named [Bush] the worst president in American history,” said Thomas Fleming, a former president of the Society of American Historians. “But maybe it’s time to suspend the rush to judgment.”