Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama held lengthy talks on issues including Afghanistan and the global economy.

Mr Cameron spent 75 minutes with Mr Obama on a tour of his White House accommodation and his vegetable patch before they were joined by officials for discussions which focused on the Middle East and the twin BP controversies, including the decision to free Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

“Releasing the Lockerbie bomber, a mass murderer, was completely wrong,” Mr Cameron said afterwards, but insisted it was a decision taken by the Scottish Executive and not by BP.

Mr Obama said the US had been “surprised, disappointed and angry” by the release but said he would “welcome any additional information that will give us insight into how the decision was made”.

Compensation

“The key thing here is we have got a British Prime Minister here who shares our anger and also objects to how it played out. The bottom line is that we all disagreed with it. It was a bad decision,” he said.

Mr Cameron also said it was right that the oil firm should “clean up the mess” caused by the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig in April and pay “appropriate” compensation.

“But would it be right to have legislation that independently targets BP rather than other companies? I don’t think that would be right. Would it be right to say that BP has to pay compensation for damages that were nothing to do directly with the spill? I don’t think that would be right,” he said.

“BP is an important company to both the British and American economies. Thousands of jobs on both sides of the Atlantic depend on it. So it is in the interests of both our countries, as we agreed, that it remains a strong and stable company in the future.”

In an interview shortly after he met Mr Obama, Mr Cameron reiterated his view that the release of al-Megrahi was wrong.

Asked about Afghanistan, Mr Cameron said: “Victory in this war is being able to hand over to an Afghan government and an Afghan army and police force capable of securing their own country because what is our national interest here?

“Our interest is that there aren’t terrorist training camps, there aren’t al Qaida camps in Afghanistan and they can look after their own security. That should not take five years to achieve, that should be done, as the Afghans themselves have said… by 2014.”