Summit about nothing

As a rule of thumb, it is wise to ignore anything said at any summit beginning with the letter G. When Harold Wilson went to the G6 summit in 1975 there was a point: there had just been an oil crisis so Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States got together to discuss it. The meetings continued without an agenda. The admission of Russia, with its appalling record on civil economic liberty, turned the G8 summits into a biannual joke. So when the G20 meets in Pittsburgh next week, the world knows precisely what to expect.

The last summit, in London, ended with Gordon Brown triumphantly claiming to have brokered a $1 trillion deal to kick-start the world economy. The figure was entirely concocted by the Prime Minister, without so much as a penny of new money. But nothing substantial, of course, can ever emerge from any such summit.