Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French president Nicolas Sarkozy will present a united public front after weeks of Anglo-French feuding over top jobs in Europe.
The pair are meeting in Brussels ahead of an EU summit - officially to discuss climate change and the state of Europe's economic recovery.
But the occasion is an attempt to draw a line under backbiting between Paris and London over who got the best deal out of the latest carve-up of commission portfolios.
To further underline the rapprochement, Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy have also co-signed an article for the Wall Street Journal setting out their shared ambition of a new "compact" between the banks and society.
The "my-portfolio-is-better-than-your-portfolio" spat developed a fortnight ago when commission president Jose Manuel Barroso announced his new team of one commissioner per member state.
A Frenchman, former French agriculture minister Michel Barnier, was handed the prestigious task of running the EU single market, including responsibility for financial services - with a potentially huge impact on the City of London.
Mr Brown denied that supervision of the City would now be in French hands - pointing out that Britain had ensured that Mr Barnier's top civil servant within the commission would be British.
But Downing Street irritation turned to fury when President Sarkozy pitched in, telling the Le Monde newspaper that the British were "the big losers" in the jobs share-out. Things worsened when a planned Sarkozy visit to London was called off last week.
Healing the rift when the two leaders meet may be harder because France is hosting talks in Paris with 21 other EU countries on the future of the Common Agriculture Policy - leaving Britain off the invitation list.
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Mr Brown and Mr Sarkozy's joint article includes an appeal to fellow world leaders to impose a one-off tax on bankers' bonuses, as outlined on Wednesday by Chancellor Alistair Darling in the Pre-Budget Report.
