GORDON has been behaving for weeks now like an excited small boy looking forward to a party which has assumed an exaggerated importance in his fevered mind. Most unwisely, the Prime Minister has invested such remaining credit as he commands in the ho
ped-for success of the G20 meeting in London on April 2. It is the last in a long train of illusions he has cultivated and this time his disappointment may be terminal.
If Gordon Brown were a Roman consul, the priests would be warning him that the pigeon's entrails were revealing auguries of appalling portent. The contemporary indicators are bad enough. The first prerequisite of Brown's planned reinvention at the G20 was to secure his special relationship with Barack Obama. By pleading, cajolery and calling in every favour the US owed Britain for Tony Blair's fawning collaboration, Brown's people were able to secure him a B List invitation to the White House that did him more harm than good.
Gordon may try to convince himself that the world now views him as Barack's key collaborator; but Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel will not be experiencing any jealousy when they converge on the new US president at the G20 meeting. It is a measure of the closeness of the Franco-German axis that the two governments have just held a joint cabinet meeting in Berlin. They are resolutely opposed to the G20 conference committing governments such as theirs to further stimulus spending.
This is one policy on which Obama and Brown are closer; but if Gordon imagined this was going to give him victory at the summit, that delusion was cruelly quashed last week when the White House announced it did not intend to seek a "specific commitment" on the economy. "We're not going to negotiate some specific economic percentage or commitment," said Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman. That dispelled any hope of Gordon's Global New Deal – though only a fantasist like Brown could have taken the possibility seriously.
With Gordon's fox shot, that pragmatic approach also lessens the likelihood of a collision between the US and the Franco-German alliance. Where Brown can salvage some common ground with the Sarkozy/Merkel bloc is in pressing for tighter global regulation of the financial sector. Yet in doing so he runs the risk of distancing himself further from Obama.
The messiah talked a good game while he was campaigning for the presidency about America opening itself to the world. That, however, does not extend to allowing the free-market interplay of Uncle Sam's financial sector to be crawled over by a bunch of foreigners. The same intrinsic isolationism that caused Dubya to keep America out of the International Criminal Court, in the juridical sphere, will ensure that globalised regulation of American citizens doing what they do best – making a fast buck – is not going to happen.
If Gordon presses for it, he will only add a second cause of resentment to his faux pas in presenting Obama with a seven-volume biography of the President's most-hated bogeyman, Winston Churchill.
So, what can the G20 summit achieve? Nothing, so far as improving our economic situation is concerned. After all, that is not its purpose. Its purpose is to look purposeful and, in doing so, to improve the credibility and poll ratings of participants among their respective electorates. The Japanese view everybody with suspicion. The Chinese are smarting from America's strictures anent their overvalued currency and the consequent 17.5% slump in their exports.
America is hopping around on one foot trying to pull its socks on, since its Treasury team is still non-existent apart from Tim Geithner at the top. It was revealed last week the US Treasury is not even answering its telephones, so great is the disarray caused by the transition. The British team is composed of Gordon's trusties: Baroness Vadera, of "Grannies will lose their blouses" notoriety during the backdoor nationalisation of Railtrack, is in charge.
If Gordon hopes to make his mark at the G20's £50m knees-up as saviour of the world, he is sadly deluded. There is only one saviour, as Barack Obama will make clear even as he goes through the motions of thanking Gordon the Baptist for his warm-up act.
The necessary remedy for the oncoming depression is tax cuts on a scale the blinkered Keynesian clones at the G20 would never contemplate, even if they balk at the scale of Gordon's coin clipping. This event will be a charade designed for peak time television audiences and will not help us in any way to escape the financial crisis. It will also be a further nail in Gordon Brown's political coffin.
