If puffed up G7 demonstrates the democracies are back it will have been worth it

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.

Chance encounters with supermodels aside; there are many reasons to wonder if these self-aggrandising summits of leaders are worth it? Especially when the only trips to foreign beauty spots that our rulers seem to be in favour of this year are the ones they enjoy themselves.

The G7 has declined into insignificance in the last decade. Back in 1975, when President Giscard D’Estaing issued the first invitations to the Château de Rambouillet, France, Britain, Italy, Germany, and the US accounted for three-quarters of global GDP. Today, that figure is closer to 40 per cent. When the banking crisis struck in 2008, G7 didn’t have the clout to stabilise the global economy. It was eclipsed by G20, a grouping that included rising economic powers in Asia and Africa, without requiring any ideological lip-service to democracy.

The G7 was initially meant to be an informal “fireside chat” between the leaders of the most important, rich, First World, industrialised democracies: a get-to-know-you session of the like-minded, respecting the Churchillian principle that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”.

Who gets to be a member is a recurring headache: G6 became G7 when Canada was signed up the year after Rambouillet, mainly at the behest of the US and UK. The European Union has long been granted a place at the table. Sometimes the EU greedily occupies three seats for its various Presidents of the Council, the Commission and the rotating presidency shared by member states.

Heads of Multilateral institutions such as the United Nations and International Monetary Fund may also attend. It is now common practice to invite, as guests, leaders of democracies with economies that now match the full membership. Member nations take it in turns to host G7. This year Boris Johnson invited India, Australia, South Korea and South Africa to take part. His idea of updating the group permanently to a so-called “D 10” has been quietly ditched.

The group ended up being embarrassed by its decision to elect Russia as a permanent member. John Major was strongly in favour of welcoming Russia into the club of Western democracies following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were seen as potential allies but it was Vladimir Putin who got to preside over the one and only G8 in Russia, in his home city of St Petersburg in 2006.

It was an unhappy final summit for Tony Blair. Putin jeeringly compared Russian corruption to the cash for peerages scandal, while George W Bush’s casual greeting “Yo, Blair” seemed revealing of their relationship, even inappropriately patronising. The planned G8 in Sochi, Putin’s favourite resort, was cancelled in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Ukraine. A chastened G7 reconvened in Brussels without Putin.

The summits have moved out of capitals and major cities since the violent confrontations with anti-globalisation demonstrators in Genoa, Italy, in 2001, leaving at least one person dead. By that time, security measures demanded lockdowns and a near state of siege in major urban areas for several weeks. Residents objected to both the cost and the inconvenience and, should their views be ignored, there would only be still larger protests.

As a result, the leaders now convene in remote tourist destinations, often high up in the mountains. The media, who are supposed to be covering the event, are kept miles away watching video feeds in press centres. The “family photos” commemorating the event are more picturesque than they used to be, which is just as well since they are guaranteed to be included in every ex-President or Prime Minister’s published memoirs.

Reporters with cameras have to be given access to record the images and fine words, much to the chagrin of the summiteers. Played right, this gives exceptional opportunities to get closer than usual and catch leaders on the hoof. Like any safari, there are risks, Boris Yeltsin growled and waved his fist in my face when I noticed he was standing next to me and tried to ask him a question.

With their habitual naivety, British officials said there would be a photo opportunity. Still, no words for any reporters who could be bothered to board a coach at 4am to head to a breakfast time Blair-Bush meeting in Kananaskis. The Americans don’t do silent photo-ops, and my producer Peter and I would rather see the Canadian Rocky Mountains than hang about in the media centre. Some hours later, we were the only Brits there, able to ask as many questions as we liked. Peter was carrying some of the camera gear to qualify for a pool pass, resulting in the memorable query from the President as Peter went in for his third go, “Hey Mister Soundman, are you a real reporter?”.

Things got more absurd after a day sunbathing in the lush meadow grass when the Prime Minister decided to give a news conference of his own, still in the absence of the press pack. We darted about to ask questions from different angles to give the impression there were more people there.

The broad agenda of G7 can also be a chance to look up from the predictable news stories of the moment. My colleagues in the lobby laughed when I asked Bernard Ingham if Thatcher approved of the French Revolution before President Mitterand’s grand bicentennial summit at La Defense in Paris in 1989. It made the front pages the next day when Le Monde asked the same question and got the same answer – No, she didn’t like it.

Boris Johnson loves a photo-op and has lined up plenty in Cornwall, even if bad weather at sea and fog kiboshed his early efforts with Biden, the aircraft carrier Prince Charles and St Michael’s Mount.

The leaders can’t always agree on a communique – President Trump withdrew his signature as Air Force One flew home from Quebec, following some headbutting with Justin Trudeau. When they do agree, the substance has usually been settled in the pre-meetings of Foreign and Finance meetings.

This year Dominic Raab’s meeting at Lancaster House was a fiasco, remembered only for an Indian delegate going down with Covid. The G7 has yet to develop a convincing response to Chinese, Russian or even Belarussian aggression. The finance ministers did better; agreement in principle on more corporation tax on big companies is already chalked up as one of this year’s achievements.

It should benefit their citizens if the leaders of friendly nations can speak to each other on friendly terms. The sense of solidarity that summits engender can embolden leaders to set the seal on developments they were reluctant to adopt singly.

Over the years G7’s have clinched measures against terrorism, tax evasion. Bono and Bob Geldof skillfully exploited successive summits in their Make Poverty History campaign for debt forgiveness. This culminated in success at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, although public attention switched immediately to the terrorist bombing attacks in London.

After Covid, Brexit and Trump, President Biden says he wants his first foreign trip – starting in the UK at the G7 – to show that “America is Back” and that “we will be stronger and more capable when we are flanked by nations that share our values and our vision for the future – by other democracies.” If they can assert that, it will have been worth spending a few days somewhere near St Ives reporting on the posturing of puffed-up politicians on a tax-payer funded jolly.