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President Sarkozy has greeted the 43 world leaders for a summit that at least looks more successful than many of us expected. He welcomed Mrs Merkel with a hug, Gordon Brown with what could have been a joke and the Turkish leader very quickly, shrugging as he left the platform.

Mr Sarkozy has made this summit about peace in the Middle East. In his main speech before the full meeting he said that the Mediterranean was the source of "all faith, all reason and all culture", that it was there that the first "fraternal civilisation" was built and from there that the religions of the book were born. He said it had created a notion of happiness, wisdom and self-esteem, but also tragedy. It had pushed to the extreme "a zest for life and fascination with death".

His central passage, too grand to be called a soundbite, was: "If this future is to be great, if this future is to be bright, if this future is to be a future of peace, a future of justice and future of progress everyone will have to make an effort, as the Europeans did, to put an end to the deadly spiral of war and violence that, century upon century, sporadically brought barbarity to the heart of civilisation."

I think it was a governor of New York who came up with that great phrase "we campaign in poetry, we govern in prose". Mr Sarkozy is one of those politicians who is full of surprises because he is always campaigning and never abandons poesy.

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