Carbis Bay, Cornwall, is providing the backdrop for the forty-sixth meeting of G7 leaders. Officially it is the 47th annual summit, but last year’s annual session in the United States was cancelled, victim to a fatal combination of Covid and Donald J Trump.
As a journalist, I’ve covered about half of these summits, starting in 1986 when I accompanied Margaret Thatcher and Sir Geoffrey Howe on the RAF VC10 to Tokyo. For the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, the highlight of the meeting was a small victory on Scotch Whisky taxes; for me, it was meeting Marie Helvin in a hotel lobby and inadvertently eating chilled whale meat.
