The longest week: And it should all have been so different: the ecstasy and the agony

It was a week that started with the unexpected joy of the Olympic win, the hopeful optimism of Live8 and the expectation of change for good at Gleneagles. IoS Political Editor Andy McSmith followed the Prime Minister through the most tumultuous seven days of his premiership. Here he retraces the events of the week in which everything changed

One day, Chinook helicopters were hovering low over a field of grass in rural Scotland, disgorging riot police by the dozen to cope with amiable bunch of scruffy protesters who had pushed past a fence. A few hundred of miles away, final preparations were under way for an act of genuine evil that caught the authorities completely by surprise. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, described the roller-coaster emotions he experienced in his packed week: "On Wednesday, people felt exhilaration and uplift.

"Then on Thursday, they felt an awful sense of tragedy and despair at the mindless killing of innocent people," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

When the week began, the Prime Minister's thoughts were directed to the island state of Singapore, where the sporting and political elites of five nations had gathered for the schmoozing, lobbying, and arm twisting that filled the final 48 hours before the International Olympics Committee's decided which capital would host the 2012 games.

Mr Blair had intended to fly in with the Secretary of State for Culture, Tessa Jowell, but at the last minute he was persuaded by the Foreign Office that while he was heading that way, he should stop off in Saudi Arabia to help firm up the desert kingdom's support for the US and British military presence in Iraq. So, first stop Riyadh; second stop, Singapore. For two days, Tony and Cherie Blair held court at Singapore's Swiss Hotel, as key members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) were ferried in and out of their suite, each being assured that the British government was fully behind the London bid. Between them, the Blairs saw between 40 and 50 delegates.

The organisers of the London Olympic bid left nothing to chance in those last vital hours, pulling an array of sports personalities, politicians, and royalty to plead London's cause.

The Paris team was visibly put out by the arrival of David and Victoria Beckham. The French had also thought about drafting in a Real Madrid player, Zinedine Zidane, but had decided that he would be irrelevant, since world-class football is one of the few sports not represented at the Games.

The Blairs had to pack up and leave at 11.30pm Singapore time on Tuesday, missing the announcement. Seven hours before they departed, up rolled Jacques Chirac - "Jacques Come Lately" as some of the British party derisively called him.

The French President had flown in from Moscow, where he had done his bit to revive the centuries of Anglo-French animosity, and turn the Olympic competition into a grudge match, by insulting British cooking during what he thought was a private chat with President Vladimir Putin.

Relaxing in a Russian café, he remarked: "The only thing they have ever given European farming is mad cow. You can't trust people who cook as badly as that."

One long flight and a shift of time zones later, the Blairs woke up on Wednesday morning in a luxurious hotel set in 850 acres of undulating Perthshire countryside. The 80-year-old Gleneagles Hotel, built to look like a French chateau, is accustomed to accommodating VIPs, but never on last week's scale, when rooms had to be found for the heads of the all the most powerful governments in the world - not only the premier division governments who make up the G8, but the five big "developing" nations, plus the EU, and at least eight African heads of government, and an army of aides, advisers, translators and wives.

The hotel has 13 presidential suites, but the £1,600-a-night Royal Lochnagar Suite is larger by far than the others. The clever chaps at the Foreign Office who handle protocol decided that it should go to the person most likely to ruin the summit, President George Bush.

Another protocol problem was finding British dignitaries to stand by the helicopter landing pad and greet these world leaders as they arrived one after another. With Tony Blair's diary chock full, the job fell to some distinctly middle-rank politicians. There to shake George Bush's hand was Lord Triesman, whose main distinction is that he served briefly as general secretary of the Labour Party. President Putin walked the long red carpet alongside Scotland's first minister, Jack McConnell.

Tony Blair's first morning in Gleneagles was taken up by one G8 meeting after another, while officials brought him the results of successive votes in Singapore. After the third ballot, which eliminated Madrid to make it a straight run between London and Paris, the Prime Minister decided that he could not stand the tension, and went for a walk on the hotel lawn with only his chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, for company. The unofficial word was that Paris - favourite throughout the bidding process - had narrowly won.

Blair decided that he would have to make a press statement anyway, and broadcast by satellite link to the crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square, to make the point that Lord Coe, Tessa Jowell and everyone else connected with the London bid deserved congratulations even if their efforts had come to nothing.

The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, still in Singapore, said afterwards that his heart sank as he went into the hall to hear the final announcement, because of the huge bank of cameras pointed at the French delegation, when only a few were watching the British.

At 12.47pm British time - 7.47pm in Singapore - Jonathan Powell's mobile phone rang. He handed it to the Prime Minister with the reported comment: "I think this will be the news we don't want to hear." In fact, it was the Downing Street switchboard, with the electrifying news that London had won.

"It's not often in this job you punch the air and do a jig," Mr Blair said later. Having hugged a startled Mr Powell, he ran back to rejoin his jubilant staff in the hotel. There was also raucous cheering in the press enclosure across the way, except in the corner reserved for French journalists, which went funereally quiet.

In Trafalgar Square, the crowd and sporting celebrities went mad.

But publicly, Tony Blair took care not to gloat, not wanting to cause unnecessary offence to President Chirac, whose support he needed in the difficult G8 negotiations that lay ahead. The grumpy French leader arrived from Singapore later in the day, and hid his disappointment gracefully as he congratulated London on its success.

By now, mounting political problems suggested that the G8 summit, that had begun so well, could end on a sour note. In the morning, the police had cancelled a long-arranged protest march, led by the dissident former Labour MP George Galloway, because protests in Edinburgh and Stirling over the previous days had got out of hand, and because of a stunt staged by anarchists who had lain down on the main approach road to Gleneagles. Their protest annoyed delegates from the pressure groups who had permission to be in Gleneagles lobbying for a better deal on Africa and climate change. Some had to walk the last few miles because traffic was at a standstill.

The protest also annoyed Sir Bob Geldof, a gangling, incongruous-looking figure in a pinstripe suit, who was happy to be photographed with Tony Blair and convinced that the world really was on the way towards making poverty history. The smaller, stockier and calmer figure of Bono was equally on the Prime Minister's side.

While the march organisers did not share the rock stars' admiration for Tony Blair, nor did they approve of the disruptive behaviour of the anarchists. They went into intense negotiations with Tayside police, promising them that the march would be peaceful. Eventually, the police allowed them to walk a route that would have brought them within sight of the G8 compound.

The march proceeded cheerfully until it reached the iron perimeter fence that formed the first barrier between demonstrators and summiteers. Here, some of the younger marchers broke through and filed across a wide field towards Gleneagles. They had one more fence to breach, and about another mile of pasture to cross before they reached the compound, but their way was blocked by a line of mounted police. As delegates watched from a distance, Chinook helicopters circled like vast birds of prey, ferrying reinforcements until the police outnumbered the protesters. After some scuffles and police charges, the field was cleared and Britain had been made safe for democracy, so it seemed.

Inside the compound groups like Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund had become alarmed by reports filtering out about what the final G8 communiqué was going to say on climate change. Five major charities combined to condemn the announcement 48 hours before it was due. Their anger was directed primarily at George Bush's administration, which they regarded as being little more than the political wing of US oil, coal and automobile interests. "They're not just influencing the White House, they are the White House," Jennifer Morgan, the director of the WWF climate change programme said scathingly.

They accused the US government of starting from such a negative position on climate change that any resulting agreement, however feeble, could be heralded as "progress". Their view was that no agreement at all would be better than one which compromised with what Ms Morgan described as an "evil agenda".

But Tony Blair values his relationship with George Bush too much to want an open rift with the US. After the G8 summit was all over, he chided his critics for indulging in "game playing", in the hope of isolating the US. His view is that the US government will shift only when public opinion in the US has shifted decisively. In the meantime, faced with American obstinacy, and with China and India on the way to becoming major contributors to global warming, the rest of the world has to keep the lines of communication open.

Mr Blair and Mr Bush politely agreed to differ during a friendly one-to-one meeting at 7.30 on Thursday morning. Afterwards, Mr Blair went straight into a similar bilateral with the Prime Minister of China, in which the main topic of discussion was China's vast coal reserves, and the type of technology it will use to burn coal to power that huge country's rapid industrial growth. In the few free minutes between this meeting and the morning's session with other G8 leaders, Mr Blair was warned that an explosion in London had brought public transport to a halt. At this stage, it was not known for certain that it was a terrorist attack, and Mr Blair's first reaction was that the G8 summit must go on as normal. As the session ended, the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, came on the phone from London to confirm there had been a terrorist atrocity.

A few minutes later, as the Prime Minister was conducting a pre-arranged press conference, the emotions of the past two days seemed to take hold. Observers did not know whether it was the actor in Mr Blair taking over, or whether he was actually on the brink of tears. "When you find yourself thinking of the death and destruction, there is just nothing more awful - not just because you're Prime Minister, but because you think of the families who are grieving, the people whose lives have been upturned because of it," he said later.

Thursday should have been the day when the G8 leaders made their announcement about aid for Africa, but that was put back while Tony Blair - after delivering a second statement from a crowded platform, flanked by George Bush and Jacques Chirac - took off in a Chinook for a flying visit to London. He returned at about 9pm.

By Friday, the deliberations of the world's most powerful politicians did not seem quite as important as they had been only two days earlier. Perhaps this was as well for Tony Blair, because the announcement on climate change that emerged on Friday afternoon lived down to the low expectations of the environmental groups. Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace, said: "The G8 has committed to nothing new but at least we haven't moved backwards on the environment." Tony Blair defended the outcome by saying that he had always had relatively low expectations from the summit, but at least there was now "a process of dialogue that would involve not just America but also China and India and the emerging economies".

The deal on aid to Africa received a better reception, with the Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, welcoming it yesterday as a "breakthrough", and Sir Bob Geldof hailing Friday as "a great day" for the world's poor.

The aid agencies showed signs of being distinctly sick of the middle-aged rock star who seemed to have set himself up as a spokesman for Africa. Peter Hardstaff, head of policy for the World Development Movement, accused Geldof of heaping "unwarranted praise" on a "dismal deal". John Hilary, director of policy and campaigns at War on Want, said: "Bob Geldof may be content with crumbs from the table of his rich political friends, but we did not come to Gleneagles as beggars. We came to demand justice for the world's poor."

If Tony Blair were to look back on the past seven emotional days and ask himself the question "good week or bad week?" - the answer, on the whole, is "good week". A YouGov poll in yesterday's Daily Telegraph showed a sharp rise in Tony Blair's popularity rating, with 49 per cent saying they are "satisfied" with how he has done his job, compared with 42 per cent "dissatisfied". In a similar poll in January, only 32 approved of his record while a dismal 61 per cent were dissatisfied.

After a terrorist outrage, opinion will usually rally behind the government of the day, unless the situation is mishandled, as it was after the Madrid bombs. And Britons also like to see their Prime Minister acting like a big player on the world stage, as Tony Blair has very skilfully done all week, through triumph and tragedy. After Wednesday's Olympic vote, he was mischievously asked whether he might want to stay on as Prime Minister long enough to be the host of the 2012 games - a thought to chill the heart of the Chancellor, Gordon Brown. Mr Blair demurely rejected the idea.

But his friendship with George Bush will continue to carry a political cost at home, of course. He can expect more critical voices, like that of George Galloway, many of whose Bethnal Green and Bow constituents were caught up in Thursday's explosions, and who suggested that US and British actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay had inevitably made London a target for terrorist revenge.

The bombing has not made it any easier for Mr Blair to push through his pet project to compel every Briton to own an ID card, since he and the Home Secretary Charles Clarke have had to admit in the past two days that ID cards would not have stopped the London bombers.

The irony is that he did not plan to devote his whole attention to world affairs. He wants to be remembered as the Prime Minister who tackled petty crime and reformed the health and education services. He has announcements on the NHS and dealing with antisocial behaviour waiting on the stocks for the day when world affairs are not demanding his attention - but they will have to wait, out of respect for the dead and those left behind to grieve.

2012 Security: £250m budget to safeguard Olympic Games likely to rise

Security levels for the 2012 Olympic Games in London will be upgraded following Thursday's terrorist attacks on the capital.

Deputy Chief Constable Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police confirmed yesterday that discussions had already begun over improvements to the proposed provisions for the Olympic Games, with the £250m currently earmarked for security likely to rise.

London was confirmed as the host city for the Games on Wednesday, less than 24 hours before the terrorist attacks on the city left 49 dead and more than 700 injured.

"The agencies have already started getting together," said Deputy Chief Constable Trotter. "All plans are being put in place to ensure a safe Olympics."

Members of London's 2012 team will consult with the Metropolitan Police, the Home Office and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to assess whether the £250m budget needs to be boosted. Many now fear it will be inadequate, particularly considering that up to four times that amount was spent on security at last year's Athens Games.

A no-fly zone over the 1,500-acre Olympic Park and the wider area of east London looks certain and the closure of City Airport, near the site, discussed even before Thursday's strikes, may go ahead.

Security was one of the 17 themes evaluated by the IOC during the decision-making process, with London's proposals gaining top marks. At the heart of the plan is a high-security athletes village within the Olympic Park. Venues such as Wimbledon and Wembley will be similarly equipped with cutting-edge security, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, has promised up to 15,000 officers to police the Games. Plans also include 6,000 private security guards and 10,000 volunteers.

Despite this, experts yesterday expressed concerns over the security budget in the wake of the attacks. Douglas Greenwell, marketing director of Group 4 Securicor, which worked with the London 2012 team on its bid, said: "If we take this week's threat level, and that level is the same in 2012, then inevitably security costs will go up."

The London 2012 communications director, Mike Lee, said any talk of changes to plans or budgets was premature: "We have seven years to ensure that security is in great shape. If the budget has to be increased to do so, then it will be."

Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, announced yesterday that the committee stood "absolutely united" with Britain against the terrorists who bombed London.

Additional reporting by Jonathan Thompson, Sophie Goodchild and Matthew Beard

G8: the final reckoning

Climate

The issues

Global warming is continuing to accelerate as pollution of the atmosphere increases. Every week seems to bring new evidence of its effects - melting polar ice-caps and glaciers, more droughts and floods and now, maybe, Hurricane Dennis.

What's needed

Experts believe that the world must keep the rise in temperature to less than 2C if catastrophe is to be avoided, which would involve rapid and deep reductions in pollution. But no one is going nearly far enough, and the United States has refused even to talk about it.

What happened

No worthwhile agreements were made on action, but there was progress on edging the US towards sanity. President Bush slightly strengthened his acknowledgement of climate change, and has agreed to join in new talks with G8 and leading developing countries.

Debt Relief

The issues

Crippling payments on massive debts which were incurred long ago hobble the economies of poor countries and stop them investing in education and health care and the other essential services that are needed to ensure long-term development.

What's needed

Some 60 countries need to have their debts relieved. They will probably never succeed in repaying them anyway. In return for the write-off they should promise to invest the money in health care, education and in tackling poverty.

What happened

The G8 agreed to cancel all the debt of 18 countries, and this could rise to 35 if they satisfy conditions set by the rich. But the conditions are likely to include free-market measures such as increasing privatisation, which may actually deepen poverty.

Trade

The issues

Trade is much more important to development than aid. The world's trading system is rigged in favour of rich countries and against poor ones, stopping them from industrialising, and ruining their farmers by dumping subsidised food on their markets.

What's needed

A thorough reform of the system, but negotiations are bogged down. In particular Tony Blair pressed for the phasing out of subsidised exports by 2010 or earlier, but France and Germany firmly opposed the proposal.

What happened

The leaders agreed to "eliminate all forms of export subsidies" but refused to set a date, making the pledge virtually meaningless. And on the same day the world trade talks became so deadlocked that they could not produce even a first draft of a potential deal.

Aid

The issues

Rich countries are much less generous in providing aid to the Third World than they were even 20 years ago at the height of Reaganism and Thatcherism, and contribute less than half of the target of 0.7 per cent of GNP agreed in the 1970s.

What's needed

The United Nations estimates that, if the internationally agreed goal of halving dire poverty by 2015 is to be achieved, rich countries need to provide an extra $50bn (£29bn) a year in aid now, and another $50bn a year by 2010.

What happened

The G8 agreed to provide an extra $50bn a year, but only by 2010 - and only about a third of this is new money. European countries are increasingly pledging to reach the 0.7 per cent target. But the US and Japan lag far behind.