Mr Brown is glowing after a successful summit where he was in his element. Now he has to focus on being prime minister again
When the leaders had wrangled their way to agreement and signed off on the summit communique, Barack Obama beckoned Gordon Brown's officials and asked whether they'd mind if he said a few words before the prime ministers and presidents got up from the negotiating table. Hell, they didn't mind. Obama had already been enormously flattering about their boss. At the joint news conference the day before, the president honeyed the prime minister with praise for his "energy and initiative and leadership" and declared that the world owed him an "extraordinary debt of gratitude". Gordon Brown stood there with the rapture of a man who is being licked all over by the most powerful person in the world.
In his private remarks, Obama was no less generous. Self-deprecatingly referring to himself as "the new kid on the block", the American president poured yet more praise on the prime minister for the skill with which he had chaired their talks. After Obama's classy toast to the host, the rest of the leaders clapped Gordon Brown.
Then, suddenly, Nicolas Sarkozy sprang up from the table and made a dash for the door. The applause had barely finished before the French president was hurtling out of the VIP suite in the summit red zone and speeding in the direction of the yellow zone where the media were camped waiting for the closing statements. Sarko was determined to get in front of the cameras before his host.
Once Team Britain realised what the French athlete was up to, the prime minister's officials sent Mr Brown off at a pant to his news conference, but it was now too late to catch up. By the time he got to his podium, his rival was already speaking. It was a cheeky breach of protocol for the French president to try to upstage his host. Yet Sarko's sprint was also a compliment to Gordon Brown. He had arrived in London making Gallic threats to walk out of the summit if he didn't get aggressive action against tax havens. About which, incidentally, Citizen Sarkozy was entirely right. By the end of the summit, he didn't want to be the first to quit. Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to be the first to make a public claim that the summit had been a triumph.
That capped an extremely good two days - probably the most personally satisfying 48 hours of his premiership - for Gordon Brown. It was also the climax of weeks of relentless work to ensure a success. He returned to Number 10 afterwards looking absolutely shattered, but sounding happy.
It is not most people's idea of a fun day out to be incarcerated in a giant, windowless tin shed on the Thames in the company of two dozen leaders, their officials and security details, and 2,000 journalists. But high finance is what Gordon Brown loves best. This is what he feels born to do. The home secretary's husband gets off on porn movies paid for by the taxpayer. Gordon Brown gets his jollies from brokering an agreement to increase the Special Drawing Rights facility of the International Monetary Fund. Even David Cameron has been heard to say, sotto voce, that his rival "looks good" when he is doing this stuff.
We must not get carried away by the hype surrounding these events, which is especially a risk if the only interpretation you consume is the one provided by British journalists. Most of the home press have given Gordon Brown at least two cheers for the G20 and some have awarded him the full three huzzahs. Much of the American press agree that one alpha male's skilful personal diplomacy and star quality guided the other leaders to agreement. Except for the US media the key player was Barack Obama who, in the words of the Washington Post, ensured that the summit was "a rare triumph of substance". The hero of the day for much of the French press was Nicolas Sarkozy with Le Monde claiming victory for the French campaign to remake "a world less Anglo-Saxon". Readers of the People's Daily are under the impression that President Hu was the go-to guy at the G20.
Downing Street won't care. It is the British media that are consumed by British voters. So Gordon Brown has to be delighted that the home crowd have given him his most sparkling reviews in at least six months. He certainly worked hard for them. He took a risk trying to create this event. It was a coup to persuade such a cavalcade of potentates to convene in London. There is a general consensus that he was an effective chairman. His pre-summit globetrotting and phone diplomacy equipped him with a detailed understanding of which issues burnt most brightly with individual leaders and where they would be ready to compromise. It was not in vain. The summit was not the abject flop that some had been predicting. Nor was it quite the titanic triumph that Gordon Brown inevitably claimed for himself. With his eye for a headline, the prime minister managed to package up the spending promises to get to the plump, round figure of $1 trillion. Close inspection of the detail suggests that not all of this money is really new and some of it may never be actually spent. His familiar weakness for reannouncing pledges that have already been made has now gone global. He also flirted with hubris when he declared that reformed international regulation of the financial markets will "prevent such a crisis ever happening again".
Ever is a very long time in both politics and economics. I seem to recall he was supposed to have abolished boom and bust once before. Angela Merkel probably had it about right when the German chancellor described it as "an almost historic compromise". The products of the summit were not astonishing, but they were not trivial either. One largely overlooked achievement was to get all the leaders, those of China and India included, to seriously commit to the Copenhagen talks on climate change.
The drizzle on Gordon Brown's parade came from David Cameron with his attempt to damn the summit with faint praise and imply that the G20 was a diversion from the travails of the economy at home. The Tory leader sniped that it was all very well hosting the world, but Britain needs some attention too.
That was a display of economic illiteracy by the leader of the Conservative party. Britain's fortunes are inextricably meshed with those of the rest of the globe. If the world stays in recession, it is not very likely that Britain is going to recover. Is David Cameron really such an idiot that he does not grasp that?
My guess is that the Tory leader is not as big an economic ignoramus as he pretends to be. He does have some understanding that Britain is part of a global economy. What he was trying to do was align himself with the many voters who will have felt that the summit meant little to their lives. The Tory leader's political point is highly literate. To the voter enduring the daily struggle to pay the bills and stay in work, the G20 will have appeared a distant event. So they met in London at the ExCel centre on Peruvian Wharf. The summit might as well have been in Peru itself so remote was this pageant from most of the public.
This is a danger to which some Labour strategists are alert. Is Gordon Brown? After his summit high, the temptation for him will be to look for further kicks of this kind. He palpably enjoys being Chancellor of the World. He looks much more comfortable in his skin playing that part than he ever did when he was simply prime minister of Britain.
How warm is the glow of international summitry; how cold is the chill of bad poll numbers, rising unemployment figures and angry voters. Global Chancellor plays to his strengths, feeds his self-confidence, garners approving headlines and wins the applause of his international peer group. How seductive to think that he can carry on in that satisfying role from here to the next election. That is the lure and that is the trap.
He is going to have to spend less time saving the world and more energy running Britain if voters are going to give any consideration to re-electing him. He will have to become a prime minister again. That doesn't mean not talking about the economy; it does mean talking about it in the same language as his fellow citizens. He will have to focus less on SDRs at the IMF and more on the experiences and feelings of people in Birmingham, Bristol and Bury. The trillion dollar man will have to learn to talk pounds and pence again.
Becoming prime minister will also mean addressing subjects other than the economy. Since he moved into Number 10 nearly two years ago, Mr Brown has not delivered a major speech on crime. In fact, I don't think he has yet delivered even a minor speech on crime. He will have to find resonant language and convincing approaches to all the other concerns that press on voters from their health to the education of their children.
History will be the judge of whether that summit truly saw the beginnings of a New World Order. The electoral jury will be gathering much sooner and they will be passing verdict on the state and future of Britain.
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