Steve Richards: Woolly words expose weakness of leaders' convictions

The politics

Do not be deceived by the grandeur of the event or the assertive posturing of some participants. This is a summit composed of world leaders with strong publicly-expressed opinions that are weakly held. A few months ago Gordon Brown admitted that he and other leaders were in uncharted waters. They still are. No leader knows for sure whether their prescriptions are the right ones or whether those that take different views are wholly wrong. They swim in a shapeless ocean unsure where the waves will take them next or which direction to turn.

The tentative but clearly defined differences explain the woolly language deployed by President Obama and Gordon Brown at their joint press conference yesterday. They are in agreement about the scale of the crisis and the need for government to intervene on an epic scale. But yesterday they hid behind the phrase that the gathering would do "whatever was necessary", an imprecise phrase that could mean more or less anything at all.

The evasiveness reflects the tardiness of other European leaders to recognise what they are up against, but also the constraints on their own freedom of manoeuvre. Brown was warned last week by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, about the dangers of another fiscal stimulus. Obama has Republicans breathing down his neck in Washington, hope of a honeymoon consensus evaporating as the recession deepens.

But their enforced evasiveness does not mean Chancellor Merkel, President Sarkozy and their supposedly more prudent allies are correct in their complacent analysis or that they will turn their backs on another fiscal stimulus at a later date. They may have to spend some more money and quite soon. Only last December Merkel was holding out against a fiscal stimulus and then announced a bigger one than Britain.

Brown and Obama are not 100 per cent sure either that their more expansionary instincts are without dangers. Brown had hoped for a "global deal" today, but if there had been agreement on another big fiscal stimulus it is not entirely clear he would have been able to deliver one. With the markets, a British Chancellor and the Bank of England looking on nervously, he might, as British Prime Minister, have been forced to oppose his own policy initiated as a world leader.

But for all the unavoidable tensions between semi-powerless leaders still coming to grips with an intimidating multi-layered challenge, it is better for the gathering to take place and it is to Brown's credit that it has done so. Later today significant reforms will be agreed on banking regulation and the IMF that would not have even been considered without the focus of the deliberately elevated event.

This is the most that can be expected from leaders who look more confident than they really are. Whatever Gordon Brown might have hoped, this was never going to be a gathering of historically epic decision making. In a summit of uncharted waters, the world's leaders are still learning how to stay afloat.