PM racks up air miles amid crisis

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/uk_politics/7705858.stm

Version 0 of 1.

By James Landale Chief political correspondent, BBC News

The global financial crisis has driven the PM to a bout of shuttle diplomacyIn the dying days of his premiership, Tony Blair took to flying around the globe. Wherever there was a foreign crisis, there he would be.

It was almost as if he found problems at home too meagre for his global problem-solving skills.

Under Gordon Brown, it was all going to be so different: no more foreign adventures for him.

The prime minister was going to stay at home and focus on domestic matters.

Well, not quite. In recent months Mr Brown has trotted the globe like the best of them.

His current trip to the Gulf is the seventh time the PM has ventured overseas in the last eight weeks.

There have been three trips to Paris, two to Brussels and one to the United States, all for the same obvious reason: the global economic downturn and financial crisis.

As the economy shrinks at home, Mr Brown might have been expected to stay at home too, focusing on helping people face the recession.

Yet he is travelling overseas because he believes salvation for the economy at home lies within the economy abroad.

If voters are feeling the pinch and some even losing their jobs and homes, they won't thank Gordon Brown if he is gallivanting abroad He wants new rules for global markets - more transparency, more regulation - that will be discussed at a summit in Washington in a fortnight.

Here in the Gulf, he wants the oil-rich states to cough up some of their foreign reserves for an IMF bailout fund for collapsing economies.

This is the stuff that Gordon Brown loves - international, detailed financial negotiations.

One senior government source told me that Gordon Brown was the "Black and Decker drill" of world diplomacy, drilling away at the detail until he got the result he wanted.

And yet there are risks.

First, the diplomacy may not work. The PM says the Saudis are prepared to contribute to the IMF rescue fund - but how much, and when, we do not know.

World leaders will attend a summit on the crisis later this monthOne senior British government source said that the UK could not treat Saudi like a "milk cow".

Some in the Gulf think the credit crunch is an American problem that should be solved there.

Others are reluctant to fund the IMF, an organisation in which they feel they have little say.

There is also the broader risk that long-term reforms to the international financial system do not - in the short term - improve the real economy at home.

In other words, if voters are feeling the pinch and some even losing their jobs and homes, they won't thank Gordon Brown if he is gallivanting abroad banging on about global financial transparency, bailout funds and colleges of financial supervisors.

They will want action that day, and at home.

Very rarely does shuttle diplomacy put food on the table.