He was volunteering to be locked into a pretty conventional approach by his sponsorship and membership (with Brown) of the Commission for Africa. In retrospect, it is fascinating to note that its report was guided by Sir Nick Stern, a treasury official and former World Bank chief economist. This is the same Stern who would go on to produce a rather dreamy report on climate change. On Africa, Stern worked with co-writer Paul Vallely (an old colleague of Bob Geldof's and a senior figure in aid charity circles). The commission was bound to produce the same sort of kindly analysis as the Brandt and Brundtland commissions that had preceded it. The Commission for Africa's report isn't awful, but it is also no more than a restatement of a wish list that is at least decades old. It calls for good government for Africa, so that wealth creation can flourish and be shared. It wants Westerners to be generous, to dismantle trade barriers, and to encourage good leadership. Hard-nosed development specialists have queued up to say that this is all fine, but the calls for African leaders to play their part have been made often enough before. When we see Africans delivering their part it may be easier to persuade Westerners to deliver theirs.

PM or campaigner?
Tony Blair confused the role of churches and campaigners with that of government, and his role as Prime Minister with that of a campaigner.

Mr Blair's job as PM is to be judiciously sceptical. His role is to point out the degree to which he is the guardian of the public purse, as well as the possessor of a tender heart. Indeed, he has done so. Forgotten amongst his subsequent rhetoric was his real-world election manifesto pledge of May 2005. Mr Blair was elected then on a promise to achieve the very modest target of delivering 0.7 per cent of the national Gross Domestic Product for aid by 2013. This is the UN-endorsed minimum standard for virtue in this area, and has already been achieved by Scandinavians (and will surely come nowhere near being delivered by the US).

Blithely ignoring his electorate and his mandate, Mr Blair went much further in late 2005 - further even than his Commission. Or at least, he affected to. His endorsement of the Make Poverty History and the Geldof/Bono rhetorical tendencies was dangerous folly. The views of these campaigners do not constitute a simple or coherent platform, but they all demand not only lots of taxpayers' money (the Commission wants that), but also the kind of development model for Africa that would be recognisable, and agreeable, to the French left or to British trade unionists (a leftism the Commission largely avoided). Bono and Geldof do not tell us much about their rationale for Africa. But it seems likely that they believe in the wisdom of Jeffrey Sachs.

Here we see a problem with Mr Blair's Messiah Politics. In this case, they make him swerve leftwards, at least in front of some audiences. While on domestic issues, or within the EU and the World Trade Organisation, Mr Blair is a fairly good neo-liberal. But once he talks about the Third World on TV, he goes all mushy and falls into line with the kind of thinking he has beaten into the ground on other fronts.

In any case, to do good he would have needed to appoint a strong and senior minister to the overseas development department and allow that person to evolve a thoughtful and realistic set of proposals. Such a minister might have been able to make it clear that there was policy as well as lofty design behind his government's thinking. This is, of course, complicated by the fact that Gordon Brown insisted on sticking his oar into policy, as Richard Dowden of the Royal African Society has pointed out. [Link] Brown did so in a way that brought glamour to his own person and office. Between these two Courts, the development and statement of serious policy by a serious ministry was all but impossible.

Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have portrayed themselves as supplicants as well as politicians, as campaigners as well as "world leaders". They compounded these mistakes by behaving rather badly on the world stage. They played the role of dissidents and moral leaders among those tough governments - the US and Japan especially - that are sticking by older, less compassionate - less socialist - views of the obligations of the rich to the poor. In fact, there were real disagreements amongst the World Bank's finance ministers about the efficacy of the particular mechanisms for debt reduction which Brown promoted as our representative.