A love-bombing from Lord Call Me Dave put it alongside a date with a matinee idol

THERE have been worse set-ups to Anglo-german meetings. Take, for example, the case of Ambassador Nevile Henderson who assured Lord Halifax before his departure for Munich that “Hitler hates war as much as anyone”. There have, however, been more auspicious ones as well.

The awkward backdrop to yesterday’s Teutonic love-in was the fact that a few days earlier a German brigadier-general had inadvertently leaked British military secrets to Russia, having dialled into a sensitive call from an insecure line in a Singapore hotel room.

Still, it would be hard to imagine quite as warm a bilateral conference between a British and European politician. Never mind two world wars and one World Cup, never mind the towels on sun-loungers, never mind – even! – Brexit. These were allies.

None the less, given past visits from such reliable figures as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss or such titans of charisma as Jeremy Hunt and Philip Hammond, having Lord Call Me Dave pop round must have been like a date with a matinee idol. However, the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock’s form of address was even more personal: Lord Call Me had become “Dear David!” each time she gushingly addressed him.

There was a slight air of “I could have danced all night” in her opening remarks. The advantage of these one-to-ones as opposed to the snatched chats across a crowded room (such as the G20 or G7) was that “we don’t have to look at the clock”, she said, looking bashfully at the floor. “We could have gone on for hours.”

David turned the colour of cooked spam. He was back at Brasenose, the Reichstag became the Rad Cam: he was a Deb’s delight once more!

Ms Baerbock even hoped that the pair would “be able to leave those conference rooms for a while” to attend a football match – a bold suggestion for one who famously couldn’t remember which team he supported. Presumably, in the spirit of bilateral relations, he’d have ended up cheering for Bayern Munich. He grinned at her: “What games we can look forward to!” The whole thing was a bit like watching your parents flirt.

Still, as Ms Baerbock reminded us, there were serious reasons for this. Vladimir Putin isn’t an obvious candidate for a matchmaker, but his role in bringing these two together was unmistakable.

The love bombing continued as Lord Cameron began to speak. He commended his opposite number’s “passion” for Ukraine – “the test for politicians of this time”. He recounted his first visit to Germany in the early 1990s, where he recalled helping to bring down the Berlin Wall – by which he meant hacking away at bits of it as a tousle-haired youth rather than being involved in international negotiations. He even brought up one of Germany’s greatest exports, the British Royal family.

Eventually, the conviviality was interrupted in the Q&A with an awkward question about the security leak, which Ms Baerbock declined to speak of in public and he wafted away, airily.

Another reporter invoked Benquo at the feast. Was the former defence secretary Mr Wallace right that Germany had been “pretty penetrated by Russian intelligence”? I wonder how they translated that verb into German. Lord Cameron removed his glasses theatrically and declared his reluctance to “play into Russian narratives”.

All in all, the summit was a reminder that Cameron really is pretty good at this stuff. Fast forward to a year’s time when poor Annalena is locked in a room with David Lammy wanging on about trans police-them or something: I bet you she’ll be dreaming of Dave.