DAVID Cameron has a very British guilty secret: beneath his bluff, plain-speaking exterior, he is a bit of an egghead. In truth, many—perhaps most—British MPs are rather geeky deep down, the kind of people who take pamphlets about welfare reform on their holidays. But in public, the most successful politicians steer clear of abstract ideas, preferring to talk about rolling up their sleeves, battling for Britain and so on.

Today, the prime minister let his inner policy wonk rip. He was hosting a summit of eight Nordic and Baltic prime ministers in London, and—in a departure from traditional summitry—the plan was to chew over ideas, comparing reforms and innovations in each country and seeing if any of the best could be borrowed by others. In the interests of full disclosure, Bagehot should admit that he was asked to be one of five facilitators at the summit, which is a fancy way of saying he moderated a bunch of the hour long policy discussions, which were otherwise closed to the press. Participants included the nine prime ministers, diplomats, think tankers and academics but also business types and a clutch of interesting people from charities, civil society and the like.

I confess that I was sceptical when I first arrived at the Whitechapel art gallery where the summit was being held. There had been talk from British officials about trying to achieve a Californian-style policy seminar, and a distinct whiff of Cool Britannia hung in the air. There were break-out rooms and clutches of chairs arranged between art installations. The prime ministers popped from one session to the next and did more listening that talking, except when they raised their hands to quiz speakers on specific details. My working assumption, to be honest, was that the overwhelming purpose of the gathering was to butter up a bunch of countries that are more or less on Britain's wavelength when it comes to free trade, Atlanticism, eco-friendly growth and the like, especially the six that are fellow-members of the European Union. I still think that alliance-building was a big part of it, though British officials looked like horses frightened by a backfiring motorcycle if anyone suggested that this was about forming a free-market gang within the EU.

After the summit, I am also prepared to believe that the idea was to talk about ideas. With money tight, every western government is on the lookout for clever ways to create new jobs and secure economic growth. Direct quotations are not allowed, but I don't think it is giving much away to say that Mr Cameron is in the market for ways to create private sector jobs to replace those shed in the public sector, that he is anxious about youth unemployment, and that he would like to make it easier for women to participate in the world of work. He is famously polite and good at giving his full attention to speakers, which is always flattering. But perhaps the most flattering thing he did, all day, was to show where he was sceptical about the ideas being described, probing and prodding and musing out loud about why a given scheme that works in a Nordic country might not fly in Britain.

The other prime ministers seemed equally cheerful to find themselves talking about crunchy questions of policy: more than one said with feeling that it was wonderful not to be at a European Council in Brussels, thrashing out the wording of summit conclusions, or talking about the future of economic governance in the euro zone.

There are some interesting things going on out there in the High North. It is less clear how many of them could work in Britain, a country of surly individualists averse to paying Scandinavian levels of tax (though in truth we are not far off from Scandinavian tax rates, as one British participant noted). Listening to Nordic and Baltic speakers explaining how things work in their countries, there were quite a lot of "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" moments. Among the more striking:

- The Estonian presentation on electronic voting, which explained that in Estonia citizens may vote by internet as many times as they like at general and local elections, though only their last vote counts. This is to help prevent bullying: if a wife, say, feels forced to cast her vote against her will by an overbearing husband, she can sneak back online later and vote a different way. An electronic ID card, a card reader and computer is all it takes.

- The Icelandic scheme that allows unemployed people to keep their benefits if they take a job with an innovative start-up company: for a limited time the benefits amount to a hefty salary subsidy for the new employer. The scheme is specifically designed to help the large number of skilled workers from the financial or high-tech sectors now looking for work after the global financial crisis hit Iceland like a steam train. The Icelandic presentation was all the more interesting for being candid: lots of firms over-hire as a result of this scheme, it was explained, and it is hard to pin down definitions of an innovative start-up. And the new jobs tend to pay much lower salaries than the old ones lost in the credit crunch. So it was far from perfect. But on balance, it had worked.

- A Norwegian presentation about digital openness versus privacy. In Norway, tax returns are published online for all to see, the speaker reminded us: it is indeed a form of national hobby to look up your neighbour's income online. But access to digital health records is currently very restricted. This means that if you fall sick in Norway, an emergency room doctor can look up how much you are paid, but cannot look up your blood type.

- A plea for governments to stop hoarding so much data in the belief that they can make money from it (by publishing maps, say, or selling weather forecasts to private customers). Governments are pretty rubbish at making money from things, a presenter noted. In contrast, governments that make lots of data public in the Nordic world have found this stimulates entrepreneurs to mash it up and do all kinds of clever things with it, especially online. And when some of those firms generate profits, the taxes on those profits have more than offset the revenues lost by governments at the beginning.

A final plenary session was public, which is lucky because it saw my favourite moment of the summit. There had been lots of warm, soft-soap stuff about the wonders of parental leave, and in particular the importance of prodding men to take more leave so that employers no longer saw women as riskier hires (because now both men and women vanish for months after the birth of a child). Mr Cameron talked about how much Britain had to learn from the Nordic nations when it comes to family-friendly policies, and waxed all enthusiastic about parental leave. It fell to the Icelandic prime minister, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, to inject some reality into the proceedings, albeit politely.

Now, Iceland's prime minister is an interesting character: a former trade unionist who began life as an air stewardess and who (or so I was told in Reykjavik a while back) built her first political contacts at 36,000 feet, chatting to the island's power-brokers as they jetted back and forth from the island. She is a popular and long-serving MP and the world's first openly gay head of government (indeed she is married to her female partner).

Today in Whitechapel, she was asked to comment on what Iceland could teach countries like Britain. I understand you had a baby last August, she said to Mr Cameron, who nodded cheerily. "Well," she went on. "If Cameron were Icelandic, he would be about to start his paternity leave about now. For three months." I don't think she was joking, either.