Kristin Gore, you are my heroine. Ms Gore is the daughter of Al Gore, the former US Vice-President, and she is the author of a new American bestseller, a piece of chicklit which has just been published here, called Sammy’s Hill.

If you or I were dreaming up the protagonist for such a book, I doubt if we would decide to make her a health policy analyst, and then to make the first scene of the book centre on a Senate hearing into the importing of pharmaceuticals from Canada to the US. But that is what Ms Gore has done. And I love her for it.

Wearing my think-tank hat, I specialise in healthcare, especially the different arrangements that EU member states make for the purchase of pharmaceuticals, and the consequences of drug importation for patients.

Last month, I went to Washington to testify before the Senate on those issues, which are raging at the moment in the US. I was, I confess, rather daunted. Would I face a grilling along the lines that the House Un-American Activities Committee meted out to suspected communists in the 1950s?Daunting as it nonetheless was, I was quite wrong to be so awed. When it comes to sustained questioning, the Senate hearing did not come close to Commons select committees.

I long ago understood that, far more than in the UK, American politics can best be understood by the axiom of Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, that “all politics is local”. Pharmaceutical importing is an issue of national importance and has profound consequences not just for patients but for the US economy itself. I assumed that the chairman of the hearing, Mike Enzi, a Republican senator from Wyoming, would use his introduction to address the subject. But I witnessed within one minute of taking the stand just how local politics is.

Mr Enzi’s initial concern, as with his fellow senators, is getting press coverage in his home state. So he spent most of his time reminiscing nostalgically about his time as a shoe shop owner and eulogising the Wyoming landscape. The other senators adopted a similar style in their first round of questions. The issue might be national, but the style is decidedly local.

British politicians are, in their own way, no less shameless about getting local coverage. Prime Minister’s Questions is full of MPs asking about their local hospital or school. It goes with the territory. But having also given evidence to a select committee, it is noticeable that, whilst committee members might not necessarily understand an issue, they pursue it. No less than 17 senators due to be at the session that I attended, however, simply didn’t turn up. I did not take it personally — not least because Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld were testifying in the adjacent rooms. The future of freedom across the world might, I realise, be slightly more of a draw than a policy wonk from Brussels talking about the price mechanism.

Each senator is given five minutes in which to ask a question and get an answer. I was warned that senators — as is politicians’ wont everywhere — like to speak for most of their allotted time, leaving only a small gap for an answer. The warning was prescient. “Don’t worry,” I was told. We might not have had time to cover some of the most important ground, “but you can add that in to the written record ”.

There is an even starker difference with Parliament. The majority party in the Senate gets to select almost all the witnesses. So only one of the four witnesses testifying at my session did not agree with my argument, and the questions were overwhelmingly favourable to my view.

Select committee hearings may sometimes be one-sided, but they usually even out the balance of the witnesses across hearings. In the Senate, however, it’s winner takes all.

I had always been slightly dismissive of select committees, and had viewed Senate hearings as far more powerful and purposeful. After my own experience, I have had to reverse my view. The Senate may be more powerful and its members more important than backbench MPs, but select committees display more sustained analysis and seriousness of purpose.

Right from the start, the contrast with the Commons, and British reluctance to be positive about our institutions, was obvious. Telling someone here that you have given evidence to a Commons select committee inspires no more of a reaction than telling them that you prefer Rice Krispies to muesli: a complete lack of interest. But I saw a very different response in Washington when I was asked why I was in town: gratitude “for coming all this way”, and an expression of honour that they had met someone engaged in such an elevated act of citizenship.

I knew before I left London that it would be sensible to play on that pride. If I turned up at a select committee wearing Union Jack cufflinks, I would no doubt be regarded as a BNP supporter. Worse, if I described myself in London as a supporter of Tony Blair, I would provoke derision.

I guessed, however, that if I wore my favourite Stars and Stripes cufflinks at the Senate hearing, I would be greeted favourably. I was right. On the record, Senator Johnny Isakson (from Georgia) congratulated me on my wise choice of cuffs. And for praising the Prime Minister, I was told by the chairman that “there are quite a few of us here who are also proud to call ourselves Blairites”.

Truly, the US is a foreign country.