Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, will meet in Downing Street tomorrow in an attempt to heal a rift over the appointment of a new European Commission President at last month's EU summit in Brussels.

Senior German officials say the chancellor and the prime minister had a telephone conversation before the summit in which Schröder believed he had secured a British promise to support Guy Verhofstadt, the Belgian prime minister and Franco-German favourite for the job.

However, at a summit dinner Blair said that the Belgian was unacceptable.

President Chirac of France, who had presumably been told of the prime minister's alleged promise, went "rampaging around the room", according to one Brussels-based official.

Schröder was said to have been very annoyed. "Plainly, the chancellor felt he had lost face towards Chirac," said a diplomat in Berlin.