EU summit: Cameron’s English breakfast and late lunch

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM – David Cameron was supposed to be having lunch about now but his first ever session at the European Council is over-running. It may be sandwiches are brought in.

I’ve just had a look at the mingling pictures from the opening of his first ever European Council. David Cameron was ushered in by his ally and political soulmate, the Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt. After a cheerful chat with Prime Minister Zapatero and a brief hello from the Cypriot Prime Minister, the EU President Herman van Rompuy pulled him over for a quick photo with the Spanish PM.

There really can’t be many occasions when, as the most powerful person in your country, you have to introduce yourself to people saying who you are but that is exactly what happens in this room. “I am the Prime Minister of Estonia,” says Andrus Ansip rather modestly to David Cameron. “We met before,” he adds.

Mr Cameron looked slightly lost only for a moment or two as he looked round trying to get the measure of the room where his predecessors have sweated before him.

There was a kiss for Baroness Ashton, he told her he got an English breakfast this morning (presumably at his meeting with President of the EU Commission, Manuel Barroso), chat with the Polish PM Donald Tusk, before his foreign affairs aide, Tom Fletcher, who did the same job for Gordon Brown, showed him round to his seat.

Prime Minister Socrates of Portugal said they sometimes have foreign ministers in these meetings too. “Better with or without?” David Cameron asked him. I wonder what William Hague would think of that.

He told the Estonian Prime Minister that he’d met Estonian troops in Afghanistan (he also said jogging at altitude in Helmand takes it out of you). Just before he had to leave the room for the meeting to start the President of the European Parliament, Poland’s Jerzy Buzek, came over to introduce himself.

It sounded to me from the tape as though he congratulated David Cameron on how his grouping in the European Parliament, the Conservatives and Reformists (or “nutters and anti-Semites” as Nick Clegg described it in one of the debates in the election) was going. Not something Mr Cameron will have heard from anyone else in the room.