World leaders filed into the most luxurious and secure seaside hotel in Germany yesterday, having been flown in by helicopter over the heads of thousands of G8 protesters.

As they settled into Heiligendamm – a whitewashed Baltic resort used by Hitler, Mussolini and the tsars – it became clear from their sleeping plan that they could be about to take part in a Whitehall farce.

President Bush checked into a 94 square metre (1,010 sq ft) suite in the orangerie, the former telegraph house of the resort, and discovered that he had been billeted in the farthest corner from Vladimir Putin, the Russian President. The two men, at odds over US missile defence systems in Eastern Europe, are being kept at arm’s length at least until they have what promises to be a frosty bilateral meeting tomorrow.

All the leaders were due to dine together last night at a 300-year-old estate 15 miles (25km) from the compound, accompanied by their spouses. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has ordained that no shop is to be talked.

“This is to be a musical evening, with Bach, Beethoven and Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,” said Ulrich Wilhelm, chief government spokesman.

But the chief protagonists could bump into each other if Mr Bush chooses to use the cross trainer and exercise bikes in the gym. That is in the Severin Palais, where the Kremlin leader is housed. Mr Putin likes to swim a few lengths before breakfast and so the two leaders could yet bump into each other in the changing room.

Mrs Merkel is based in the Burg Hohenzollern, a Disney-like reconstruction of the 19th-century original. Its advantage for the German Chancellor is that she can reach Mr Bush, unobserved, by the back door.

Downstairs there is a library, with Cluedo and Monopoly boards as well as a chess set, all somehow appropriate for G8 club members. To secure a breakthrough on climate change it may be necessary, diplomatic observers speculate, to talk to one leader in the library and another in her suite upstairs, and make a quick foray through the back door to the Americans. It all sounds a bit like Brian Rix or Benny Hill.

Most of the leaders, including Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy, are staying in the Kempinski Grand, closer to the Russian leader than to the German. Their suites face the sea but are half the size of Mr Bush’s quarters. Their likely rendezvous point is the Nelson Bar – an unhappy name, perhaps, for the French leader – which boasts a jazz pianist and stuffed leather armchairs.

The Nazis turned the 18th-century buildings into a popular spa for deserving comrades. During the war it became a military hospital and was painted black to protect it from British bombers. When the Third Reich collapsed, the Red Army moved in and eventually handed it over to the East German health system. After communism collapsed, it was sold.

German leaders in the past have had a foible for sauna diplomacy. Mrs Merkel is also a sauna fan. Her hotel has a mixed-sex hamman (Turkish bath) that may prove a suitable place to discuss climate change.

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