The Spectator debate on Monday will no doubt pick up from Cameron’s statement to the House of Commons after the G8 meeting on Wednesday. It was wafer thin; so were his achievements.
The spin generated by Number 10 in recent days has verged on the absurd. On Tuesday, according to The Times headline, Cameron was ‘leading the West to ambush Putin on Syria’. Does anyone believe that this is the way to handle the Russians, let alone Putin? Nor, of course, did it happen.
By Wednesday we were being told that ‘The West tries to engineer a coup in Damascus’. No sign of that either.
By the time the Prime Minister appeared in the House of Commons he had come down to earth. The agreement, we now learn, is to support a Geneva II process to deliver a transitional authority – a proposal that has been around for many months but that seems to have been delayed rather than accelerated by the deliberations of the G8.
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