Why this G7 summit matters more than most

It’s risky planning a trip to the British seaside at any time of year. But if the weather forecast is to be believed, Boris Johnson will get away with this gamble at the weekend’s meeting of the G7 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall.

Brexit’s critics were always going to seize on any evidence that Britain was being sidelined by the rest of the world after we left the EU. So it is fortunate for the government that the UK is the host of this year’s summit because it has placed this country at the centre of things.

This G7 is unusually consequential. It is the first time that these leaders have met in person for well over a year. This will give the meeting momentum; it would be hard to think of a worse format for diplomacy than group video calls. It is also the first summit of the new US administration. Every G7 summit when Donald Trump was in the White House was a damage-limitation exercise. But Joe Biden is an old-school believer in the western alliance and he will be keen to make these events work. Just look at the G7 deal on a global minimum level of corporation tax. This was achieved, in large part, because of America’s willingness to let other major economies tax its giant technology firms. Finally, this week’s summit has an immediate practical problem to solve: how can the developing world get enough vaccine doses? (In a sign of how Covid is still derailing diplomacy, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will only attend virtually because of the severity of the pandemic there.)

Britain’s international role can’t just be built on hosting summits, of course. Influential government figures argue that this week you can see the priorities of the UK’s new foreign policy emerging.