On one topic Labour and Tory are united: the media have been biased in their reporting of the G20 London summit. At the foreign secretary’s official residence in Chevening last weekend, Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, commiserated with David Miliband about the poor coverage Gordon Brown was getting for his efforts to save the world. By the end of the week, however, it was the Tories’ turn to snipe about the “herd-like” media’s applause for the prime minister’s trillion-dollar package.
When asked to grade his own performance at the summit, President Obama said, “Well, I think I did okay.” That verdict equally applies to his hard-working British host. The prime minister won the respect of his peers and put on a decent show. How much difference will it make to how we vote next year?
Brown’s bounce from the summit amounts to a three-point gain. In our Sunday Times/YouGov poll , the Tories retain a seven-point lead at 41%. Not bad for No 10, but not good enough. The prime minister saves the world but still loses Britain, on this reckoning.
Brown was never going to be an international superstar in the mould of Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher, who inspired intense admiration abroad, sometimes at the expense of their popularity at home. Not for him such high points as the Iron Lady’s meetings with Reagan and Gorbachev, or Blair’s intimacy with Clinton and Bush. But Brown’s mastery of the agenda, his graft and the skill-set of British officials are ideally suited to a painstaking round of multi-lateralism. Sorry, that really wasn’t meant to sound like a put-down.
The template was the Gleneagles summit four years ago, behind which Brown, then chancellor, had also been the moving force, although Blair grabbed the limelight. Then, the G8 agreed with the demonstrators outside to “make poverty history” by boosting aid to Africa. A few countries even paid up.
Africa’s poverty is still with us, but so is Brown. Personal diplomacy, even when conducted by a giant like Churchill, often goes awry. Blair’s summit-climbing led to his fall. At Crawford, his pledge to President Bush that Britain would fight alongside the Americans in Iraq failed to secure a quid pro quo of postwar reconstruction and the revival of the Middle East peace process. David Reynolds, the historian of 20th-century summits, compares Blair’s diplomacy rather harshly with that of Hitler’s dupe, Neville Chamberlain: “a well-intentioned leader convinced of his own rightness, whose confidence in his powers bordered on hubris”.
Brown is habitually cautious, unlike his soaring predecessor, but he should have abandoned his ambitions for a coordinated fiscal stimulus as soon as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, barked “nein” some weeks ago. Talk of “a second Bretton Woods” and “the Grand Global Bargain” was from then on overblown. The summit did not solve the problem of global trade imbalances and toxic bank debts either, but then you can’t change frugal Germans into high-spending Anglo-Saxons and vice versa.
The G20, like other international meetings, provides sacred drama. As the late Conor Cruise O’Brien observed of the United Nations talking shop: for all its drawbacks, it was “a theatre in which people improvise versions of contemporary history, posture before the world, let off steam and occasionally devise rituals that can save the peace, most often through saving the faces of powerful people”. By this standard the summit was a success. The spectacle avoided making things even worse than they already are.
The summit may do some positive good: IMF funds will ease the desperate plight of the former communist countries of central and eastern Europe that must be integrated with the West.
Tory high command wrote off last week to Brown and wisely avoided carping. David Cameron was pleased to get 30 minutes with Obama on the same day as the president saw Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and Hu Jintao of China. Cameron and George Osborne also had meetings with half a dozen world leaders which suggests the visitors know which way the wind is blowing here.
“The week before, Jacqui Smith’s expenses were all the rage; this week it was the G20, next it will be something else,” reasons a Tory bigwig. That something else – unless the spouse of another cabinet minister is caught gawping at the Adult Channel – is likely to be the size of the government’s deficit. On April 22 it’s budget time again.
The chancellor’s keynote speech is likely to be full of woe, even if his own forecasts of economic growth aren’t as bad as those of other international economic organisations. The decision to put off the budget until after the G20 summit looks like a serious mistake. You get the bad news out first, before delivering the good stuff.
If the Tories wish to seal the deal with the electorate, this must be the moment they make their mark. Last October Osborne set his party’s face firmly against the government spending more billions to reflate the country out of recession, taking the view that you shouldn’t go on pumping air into a burst tyre.
The transformation of the Tory leadership from benign figures in the age of plenty into the Scrooges of the age of scarcity is nowhere near complete. Cameron still has to find a way of looking parsimonious in the public interest. He must make our flesh creep with tales that Britain faces becoming a second-rate nation again, as in the 1970s, unless we mend our ways. The prime minister derides this stance as “do-nothing”. But since their isolation last year, the Tories have acquired some powerful allies.
Merkel’s refusal to take lectures from a spendthrift Brown might have been predicted, but the intervention of Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, was not. By warning against the dangers of borrowing billions on an uncertain outcome, the governor thrust a dagger at the heart of No 10.
No 11 has also subtly distanced itself from No 10. Alistair Darling is likely to be chancellor only until June next year, whether or not Labour wins the next election. The recent New Statesman interview by Brown’s thrusting protégé Ed Balls, the schools secretary, looked like a thinly disguised job application. So the chancellor knows he must look to his own legacy. Although some economists argue that Britain has sustained much higher levels of spending in its history, Darling is unlikely to raid the piggy bank again. He has the governor of the Bank on his shoulder and he cannot afford another misfiring auction of government debt like the last one.
The Tories have a receptive audience among voters, too. The government has spent far too much already, say the polls. More debts will have to be repaid by higher taxes, sooner rather than later. No 10 has already put off a comprehensive spending review to address the new austerity. “The danger is Gordon will still be painted as the spend, spend, spend guy of the present,” says a gloomy Labour dissident. “Unless we make it clear we are prepared to take difficult decisions about how we are going to balance the budget, we will hand the card of economic competence to Osborne and the future to the Tories.”
Brown wants to fight the next election on the grounds of substance versus flimsiness, investment v cuts, just as if this were a rerun of the 2001 campaign against William Hague. This made sense in a period when the public put a priority on public spending over tax cuts. Yet the ground has shifted.
The Tories now have room to warn of a hidden Labour tax bombshell at the next election. Brown will be praying in turn that the green shoots in the housing market on both sides of the Atlantic point to recovery. Whether his efforts to save our economy or the world have any relevance to that recovery is immaterial. Hyperactivity, summitry and the rest are a necessary part of his theatre of politics. The medium is his message.
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Dean - I think you've just summed up the problem right there - "we can now have a life" - this should have been the case right from the start. I don't quite follow the argument with savers, I think they're in the same boat as you now.
Lenny, London,
Dean, you should have been able to pay your mortgage before the recent interest rate reductions, unless you over-stretched yourself. Don't deride the savers, most are 'little people' too and we are feeling the pinch severely due to the current low interest.
Graham, Driffield, UK
i hope they keep interest rates down. we both work and the mortage down by three hundred pound a month, we can pay our bills, and have a life. it now suits the little people of this world, and not the big boys with savings. They are now crying, as they have to rob peter to pay paul.
dean, wednesbury, west midlands
paul, poole, england
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