CUE ABBA:

Daggers drawn over the dinner table (George Jones and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 19/06/2004, Daily Telegraph)

The 10 new entrants to the European Union must yesterday have been wondering what sort of club they had entered.

At their first summit as full members, they were treated to a spectacle of bitter wrangling by EU leaders over who should take charge of the executive machinery. "This was not a happy family event," one diplomat said yesterday.

On Thursday night, the eve of the 189th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, they sat down on the 24th floor of the Justus Lipsuis buildings to a dinner of wild Irish smoked salmon, Wicklow lamb with asparagus and Irish farmhouse cheeses, washed down with Chateau MacCarthy, St Estephe, 2000.

Pat Cox, the Irish president of the European Parliament, said yesterday that the EU leaders "suffered a degree of indigestion".