President George W. Bush was doing his best this week to be the new, collaborative man, flattering other Group of Eight leaders as he collected 60th birthday presents, and appeared to accept the trade-offs of multilateral diplomacy.

Yet it was the off-mike exchange with his closest ally, Tony Blair, the British prime minister, at Monday’s G8 summit that confirmed the caricature of Mr Bush: a man who could sum up the solution to the Middle East conflict as: all they “need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over”.