Now George P, the son of former Florida governor Jeb and his Mexican wife, Columba, has co-founded a new organisation, Hispanic Republicans of Texas (HRT), to promote and support Latino candidates for office in the Lone Star state.

Slick bi-lingual television commercials marking the launch showed how the handsome and clean-cut Mr Bush is a natural before the cameras in both English and Spanish – confirming the belief of many that, in time, he may become a powerful candidate to take the Republican banner forward nationally.

But the 34-year Texas attorney and property developer, a college football star who married his law school girlfriend Amanda, now a media lawyer, was not present in person for the group’s formal unveiling in the state capital, Austin.

For he was recently sent to Iraq as an intelligence officer in the Navy reserves – a war-zone deployment that only further burnishes his credentials as a politician-in-waiting.