Wily political mastermind and cute baby-talk inspire leaders

It was opera buffa meets masters of the universe. It had everything. A location to die for in the Palazzo Vecchio's stunning Salone dei Cinquecento. Fanfares. Guards in traditional yellow or red and white pantaloons, with halbards and plumes.

A cast of six world leaders - Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Lionel Jospin, Gerhard Schroder, and Massimo D'Alema - and an audience of international glitterati.

And a big idea - the Third Way, progressive governance, reinvigorated social democracy, the New Way, die neue Mitte . . . you pays yer money and takes yer pick.

The "comrades" were gathered to chart the way forward for the centre-left, though the term is perhaps a bit old Labour. "Friends", we say today, and the accent was on the informal: Bill, Tony, Lionel . . . "I agreee with Gerhard."

No wonder that the co-host of the conference, Prof Patrick Masterson, Dean of the European University Institute, looked like the cat that got the cream. There was a sense of entering a new era, he said, exhorting them in Yeats's words to dare to "look up in the sun's eye".

Historical symbols abounded. Five hundred years ago in this very building Niccolo Machiavelli created modern politics as he advised his Florentine masters on how to face the challenges of their day. This grand-daddy of all spindoctors would have smiled - to be perceived as a great man was more important than to be one, he would have advised, and he would have loved the linguistic ambiguity, or some say vacuity, of their project. And the cameras in the hall itself, from which the Florentine republic's briefly empowered citizenry ran the city, lingered on Vincenzo de Rossi's Hercules Holding Atlas's Globe or Michelangelo's Victory. An adman's dream.

And, inevitably, Mr Clinton spoke of their project as the basis of a new renaissance for the 21st century. "We believe that ideas matter," he said. Launching the debate on Saturday night with an impassioned appeal to "go beyond the competing models of industrial age politics", he spoke of a new role for governments as empowerers of people rather than masters. Not that all had their minds on the real business at hand. Cherie Blair's presence was all the British press cared about. The news revealed by the father that "The Conception" occurred after the famous holiday and back in Britain led to immediate speculation that the act may well have occurred during a stay at Balmoral. Frissons of excitement.

The media was not alone in being interested. One leader suggested the couple had decided to breed a baby to take on the campaign trail. There will be no baby on the campaign trails, a Downing Street spokesman insisted. And the President of the European Commission, Mr Romano Prodi, broke from a reference in his speech to the falling birthrate to note wryly that some were trying to do something about it singlehanded.

Downing Street said the couple were "very touched" by the warm response of leaders and the public. Unplanned? Machiavelli would not have believed it.