Suppose you are giving a dinner party. The placement is tricky, because the guests just happen to be the eight most powerful men in the world, and some of them are barely on speaking terms. On the eve of the big day, one of the guests makes some deliberately incendiary remarks about your home cooking to two of the others in front of journalists, who duly publish them. The gist of his tirade is that your food is not merely inedible – a pile of merde, in fact – but the worst in the world, except for Finland. The other two don’t, apparently, dissent from this view, even though one of them knows perfectly well that his countrymen rightly regard Finland as a gastronomic paradise compared to their own land.

That, roughly, is the situation in which Queen Elizabeth II found herself last night, when she gave a banquet for the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Not, you will agree, an enviable predicament for any hostess. But President Chirac’s reported conversation with Chancellor Schroeder and President Putin last weekend was revealing in more ways than one. The theme of this summit was, ironically, supposed to be food, or rather, the lack of it, in Africa. To the naive but sincere idealism generated by the Live 8 rock concerts, Mr. Chirac responded with a sybaritic, self-satisfied cynicism that is typical of the West European elite.

With the partial exception of Prime Minister Blair, the G-8 leaders know little about Africa, and most of them care less. One thing they all ought to know, however, is that E.U. subsidies and tariffs are a major obstacle to free trade, especially for African food producers, and that the chief culprit responsible for the iniquitous Common Agricultural Policy is France. Abolishing E.U. subsidies and protectionism, of which the main beneficiaries are French farmers, would do more to make Africa self-sufficient than any amount of aid or debt relief. On this, as on so much else, Mr. Chirac is rightly identified as the villain of the piece.

The Chirac-Schroeder-Putin presummit meeting took place in an interesting location: Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg. Once the capital of East Prussia, annexed by Stalin after World War II to provide a base for the Soviet Baltic fleet, left stranded by the collapse of communism, Kaliningrad is now a Russian enclave in the heart of Europe. The Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis ostensibly met there to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the city’s foundation by the Teutonic Knights.

Curiously, the Poles do not seem to have been invited. Any cozying-up of their German and Russian neighbors makes Poles suspicious, Poland having been occupied, partitioned, or removed from the map several times in the past three centuries. Nor have Poles trusted France, once their closest ally, since Mr. Chirac notoriously told them they had “missed a good opportunity to keep quiet” when they sided with America over Iraq.

Mr. Chirac’s latest diplomatic triumph is, of course, the fact that London got the 2012 Olympics after all. Mr. Blair, who has made a big effort, deserves some of the credit, but the truth is that London is now a far more exciting city than Paris, whether measured by politics, economics, or culture. If Paris is the capital of socialism in Europe, London is the capital of capitalism. And in this modern tale of two cities, there could be only one winner.

For once, we could be forgiven for feeling just a little Schadenfreude. This is not directed at New Yorkers: You had the odds stacked against you in the present climate of global anti-Americanism.

No, it is the French who have had their just desserts. And the booby prize goes to Mr. Chirac, whose crude display of xenophobia seems to have disgusted the Olympic committee and embarrassed his compatriots. For the past few days, he has been kept out of sight by the French Olympic team, just in case he committed any more gaffes. Now he has to face Mr. Blair, fast becoming his bete noire, at the G-8 summit. Mr. Chirac once told Mr. Blair to his face that he was “badly brought up.” I trust that Mr. Blair will be magnanimous. In fact, he should offer the French president an honorary knighthood, for services to British sport.

It will be interesting to see what kind of reception Mr. Chirac receives when he gets back to Paris. They may not yet be setting up the guillotines, but the French public has no time for losers. The courts are eagerly awaiting the day when Mr. Chirac’s presidential immunity is lifted, so that his allegedly corrupt conduct as mayor of Paris can be scrutinized.

In case the French president finds himself in need of a refuge, the British have given hospitality to many of his predecessors, from Bourbons to Bonapartes. Perhaps now is not the best time for Mr. Chirac to move to London. However, I can recommend an idyllic island in the south Atlantic. Another dyspeptic (and Anglophobic) French head of state ended his days in St. Helena; but I fear that food fit for Napoleon would just not be good enough for Jacques Chirac.