What I hope will happen at this G8 meeting is that the G8 countries together, faced with this demand – quite rightly – from Africa and the rest of the poor world, will reaffirm their commitment to creating rules for trade that are not only free but fair.”Meanwhile, British diplomats have helped to secure an agreement to fight corruption in Africa. Companies that extract oil and minerals will have to publish the full details of deals they strike with the relevant governments.This follows a series of allegations that money from extraction rights has been siphoned off into private bank accounts. A dispute about whether the rules should be compulsory or voluntary was settled under a compromise deal that says governments will have the option of whether to sign up to the agreement or not, but companies will be bound by their government’s policy. Supporters of the deal say that it will work provided a “critical mass” of the richest nations joins up.. With smiles and a firm handshake, George Bush and Jacques Chirac set about repairing Franco-US relations yesterday.

But Washington in particular is making it crystal clear that the process will take some time, to put it mildly. In St Petersburg, Mr Bush and President Vladimir Putin were chumminess personified.”My good friend” Vladimir is being granted anew the honour of a repeat visit in September to the Bush ranch at Crawford, Texas, to which, famously, President Chirac will not be invited “any time soon”.With Mr Bush smiling beside him, Mr Putin told reporters: “I must say the fundamentals between the United States and Russia turned out to be stronger than the forces and events that tested [our relationship].” The fundamentals, in this case, are Moscow’s support in the war on terrorism, and its increasing alignment with the West.Germany’s opposition, by contrast, will not be forgotten. Mr Bush and Chancellor Gerhard Schr? did shake hands and exchange a few pleasantries. But there will be no bilateral session in Evian, and no invitation for Mr Schr? to the White House, let alone Crawford. The US intention is to play on Germany’s enduring historic insecurities by keeping it out in the cold.With France, however, the resentment goes deeper still. The sin of Paris lay not in opposing US policy on Iraq, but in its systematic marshalling of that opposition on the Security Council and beyond.

Unanimous passage of resolution 1483, lifting UN sanctions on Iraq, has mended a few fences but neither side will give ground on the fundamental issue. “We have not changed our point of view and neither has the United States,” M. Chirac’s spokeswoman said.On the eve of Mr Bush’s arrival in France, his National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, gave an interview to Le Monde in which she called the French stance on the war “particularly disappointing”. She said: “There were times when it appeared that American power was seen to be more dangerous than Saddam Hussein.”She also attacked the French President’s warnings to various central and east European countries poised to join the European Union about their support for military action against Saddam. “We thought we had a common understanding that there was no conflict between a European identity and a transatlantic identity,” she said.But even if the feud over Iraq is set aside, the Evian meeting is unlikely to linger in Mr Bush’s memory as the highlight of this relatively rare foray abroad. He prefers to deal with matters of “hard” US power (such as his attempt tomorrow to prod Israelis and Palestinians towards a settlement) to the meanderings of “soft” power. And nothing, in his eyes, symbolises “soft” power as much as these unproductive talking-shop summits.In that sense, his early departure from Evian is not merely a less-than-subtle signal of his feelings towards M Chirac.