Seoul in the spotlight as G20 host

What an extraordinary city this is. Vast, sprung up from the devastation of the Korean war, now shiny and buzzing.

Though it’s not buzzing quite as much as it normally would be. Half the cars have been told to stay at home so as not to clog up the streets and get in the way of important convoys.

There have been public information films run on the telly telling Koreans to be on best behaviour and not to jump queues or traffic lights while the big delegations are in town. This is the first G20 to be hosted by Asia and the Koreans don’t want it to go wrong.

That has some impact on the scale of ambition for this summit. The fact that it’s happening at all helped to concentrate minds and get agreement on areas like banking reform and IMF reform which will be formally signed off in the final communiqué. But now that all the world leaders are here in town, one diplomat told me, the Koreans would rather have a cosy nothing of a summit, no real agreements of substance, than a row. Sometimes you need a row to get movement but one advance party sherpa I spoke to wasn’t at all confident there would be anything substantial coming out of this gathering.

I suggested to one official that this was the Vera Lynn “We’ll Meet Again” summit because nothing else was going to be agreed. He corrected me saying that they hadn’t yet even agreed when the next meeting will happen.

So the most, the very most that Britain and the US would hope to get out of this summit is a timetable for agreement on currency changes (less manipulation of the Chinese currency) and trade surpluses (something that looks like rebalancing the world economy with the surplus countries like China and Germany spending more). That is looking very difficult at the moment, I was told.

But it is early days. Bi-laterals are happening all over town. Watch this space.