Leading article: We need leaders fit for a climate of change

It is infinitely better that the leaders of the world's richest nations should know each other personally and hold regular summit meetings than that they should huddle in twos and threes and shout at each other from afar. The reactionary call to scrap these tax-funded junkets, repeated by the Daily Mail yesterday, is short-sighted and wrong. Last week's meeting of the G8 was a vindication of the principle of jaw-jaw, even as Vladimir Putin rattled the nuclear-tipped sabre of cold war-war.

Certainly, there have been G6, G7 and G8 summits in the past that have been ceremonial talking shops, selling only windy platitudes, but last week's was emphatically not one of them. Despite the disappointing text of the final communiqué that came out of Heiligendamm, the agreement on climate change was hugely significant. Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee, complains that the G8 did not do enough. Of course it did not, but this newspaper prefers an optimistic reading.

Two features of last week's deal were important. One was that the United States formally signed up for international action to cut greenhouse gas emissions - and for action under the aegis of the United Nations at that. George Bush was forced to cross several of the "red lines" that he had drawn in advance as the limits of US concessions. The other was that the six members of the G8 that are committed to the explicit and demanding target of a 50 per cent cut by 2050 held firm to it, and thus kept up maximum pressure on the US and Russia, the two sceptics.

Without this degree of consensus among the G8 and the "plus 5" of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa, little that is worthwhile would be possible. Tony Blair deserves credit for helping to bring world leaders to this point, along with Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and US opinion leaders. Now, though, after Mr Blair's last G8 (and Mr Putin's), the process enters a new phase. The world needs to move equally urgently from agreement on the ends to delivery of the means.

As it happens, the new world order, in which all leading nations are united in their efforts to secure long-term goals of climate stabilisation and an end to poverty, coincides with new leadership in this country. Mr Blair helped to bring the G8+5 this far; Gordon Brown now has the chance to use Britain's influence to maintain the momentum in the next phase. It may be that Mr Blair's skills were suited to the construction of consensus; Mr Brown's may be suited to the practical phase of devising policies to deliver the agreed goals.

We hope so. Mr Brown is poised between the old order and the new. He is associated with the failures of Mr Blair's foreign policy as well as the successes. He voted for the Iraq war and signed the cheques. He is implicated in the Government's see-no-evil policy towards BAE's Saudi Arabian arms deal. John Rentoul today offers a spirited defence of pragmatism in a murky world, but New Labour promised something different: greater transparency and an ethical foreign policy. Mr Brown could do worse than return to the spirit of 1997, the idealism so much in tune with his own avowed sense of moral purpose.

Mr Brown is well placed to continue Mr Blair's excellent work in promoting long-term solutions to African development rather than short-term fixes. He has been less demonstrative about the environment than any of his domestic rivals, Mr Blair, David Miliband or David Cameron. Yet he shows a firmer grasp of the economic and political realities of a serious green programme than any of them.

The key difference between Mr Brown and Mr Blair's concept of our role in the world could be the idea of Britain as an exemplar. Mr Blair has always resisted the idea that the British people should risk putting themselves at a short-term disadvantage for a long-term higher purpose. He mocks the idea that any politician facing re-election would act to prevent people from flying; yet Mr Brown has just doubled airport tax, which should cut British flights by 4 per cent.

Mr Miliband, the Secretary of State for the Environment, has advocated the idea that this country should set a green example to the world. As the world moves from the declaratory to the delivery phase, the electorates of rich nations will be asked to take some risks in trying to realise the "first-mover advantage" of leading the way to a low-carbon economy. Similarly, there may be a price that has to be paid for African development and an ethical foreign policy.

We sense that Mr Blair's cynical reading of public opinion is out of date, and that Brown's Britain could be bolder than Blair's in setting an example to the world - on the environment, on fair trade for Africa and on cleaning up the arms trade.

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