Chinese negotiators achieved their goal at Copenhagen climate talks in ensuring financial aid for developing nations was not linked to external reviews of China's environmental plans, its top climate envoy said today.

The former Tory cabinet minister John Gummer is to quit the Commons at the general election to take on a wider international role in combating global warming, he announced today.

Being angry about the devil is a standard refrain for Hugo Chavez. In 2006 he declared that George Bush was Lucifer incarnate, and just last week he told the Copenhagen climate summit that in Barack Obama's presence he could "still smell sulphur". At home, though, the devil has been ousted by a holier enemy: the Venezuelan leader has turned his ire on a dead American Angel.

Efforts to secure a legally-binding climate change deal failed last week because talks were "held to ransom" by a small number of countries, Gordon Brown said today.

Disappointing the outcome of the Copenhagen summit may have been. And chaotic – the word used by Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Climate Change. But it was disappointing, in part, because expectations were so high, and one reason for the chaos was that so many countries, with such differing requirements and concerns, attended, not to speak of the specialists and NGOs demanding their say from the wings.

Perhaps our expectations were too high. Yet we should be clear about what precisely was disappointing about the accord that was reached in Copenhagen yesterday, and what was worthwhile. We have known for some months that a legally binding treaty was most unlikely. The crushing disappointment was that the undertaking to sign such a treaty by the end of next year was dropped from the final document. What was achieved in Denmark was no more than the old standby of diplomacy: agreement in principle. That principle is important, of course. For the first time, all the nations of the world accept that climate change is a problem and that they must do something about it.