I think I was 8 years old. I had been taken by my parents to a brand new suburb called Crawley New Town. It was 1956 – and we lived in the depths of the Sussex countryside. But not so deep as to prevent a 45 minute run to what I then found to be a rude awakening to Britain’s suburban future.

But my Dad was not simply anxious to introduce his boy to this endless succession of brick “semis”, but to the leaders of the Soviet empire. Khrushchev and Bulganin were legends in their own somewhat oppressive lunchtimes. I knew the Russians were the new enemy. The Daily Express – the only paper I saw at school – told me so. But for some reason my deeply conservative father wanted me to set eyes upon the communist “enemy”.

When I did so that morning, they looked exceptionally boring. Two old, slightly overweight guys in ill-fitting double breasted suits. They looked like unsuccessful gangsters.

Why do I suddenly conjure this uninteresting memory? More than fifty years on, another communist, another time. Now my “enemy” is my friend. No time for Crawley New Town. This time it’s Longbridge and beyond. China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao lands in Birmingham, not at the once spanking new Gatwick.

Mr Wen is here to buy, not to sell. The old Ruskies thought they were stealing a propaganda march on “Super Mac” Macmillan. Mr Wen needs no such propaganda coup. He’s only here to remind us who is now boss – of much more than Longbridge’s once imperial production line. What greater emblem than that he should control the MG production line – a car once more British that the British.

And yet, it seems we have more influence over Mr Wen’s treatment of his own people, than ever we had on Khrushchev’s. Two hugely prominent, globally renowned, China dissidents, Ai Wei Wei and Hu Jia, have had to be moved from jail to house arrest as if to try to stem potential street protests to the Chinese Premier’s visit. Can these releases really have been “coincidental”? Hu Jia, China‘s most active activist for Aids victims, was bunged inside to prevent embarrassment during the Beijing Olympics.

Read more: China and UK in £1bn trade deals

Is all this mere window dressing? Certainly even as a child I though Wen’s counterparts’ visit was little more. I was assisted by my dad telling me through the rear view mirror, as we rattled along the A23, that communism was a very nasty sport, and that these men might look cuddly but that they wore steel toe caps. These days we don’t discuss Mr Wen’s toe caps. We don’t even discuss his brand of communism. He’s on the up and we are on the down.

Welcome to the new world order! Consolidated this sunny morn, by the intriguing election of the father of Brazil’s food programme to head the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Jose da Silva beat Spain’s former Foreign Minister by 92 votes to 88. The South has finally overwhelmed the North to run one of the UN’s major aid programmes. Will Mexico seize Strauss Kahn’s dented IMF crown against France’s beguiling Finance Minister? Will Mr Wen carry off the curtains from Number Ten?

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Virtually every international operative of any stature was there, in one vast room.

The ‘there’, was here, in Geneva, the UN’s other home. Ban Ki-Moon came in at 9am, spoke for 10 minutes and disappeared.

A well-honed, well-delivered speech, but no sense of occasion or presence. Behind him, however, a phalanx of heavyweight talent.

Pascal Lamy, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation – dynamic, brusque, no nonsense and the man whose mere invitation had ensured that the others all turned up, including Ban Ki-Moon.

Angel Gurria, the charismatic orator who heads up the OECD came next. Behind him Robert Zoellic the American former trade secretary now head of the World Bank, who is again extremely impressive in the flesh. Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF. Helen Clark, the former New Zealand Premier who heads the UNDP. The cast went on and on.

What struck me was that these global institutions are currently in exceptional hands. But what also struck me was that the representative bodies that tag around in their wake are amazingly cumbersome. The room at the WTO sported a delegate and some sort of support from virtually every member state of the United Nations.

Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of air miles had been burnt to get them to the event. Their capacity to interact with these speakers was limited by the size of the room and the length of the day. The whole thing might have been infinitely more effective had it been done via a video-conference online.

The event? I have got this far without even mentioning it; it was a review of the Aid for Trade project – about countries in the north assisting in developing the trading capacity of countries in the south by investing infrastructure and systems that will level the trading playing field. This while the latest trade round, the ‘Doha round’, is stalled (incidentally everyone I spoke to felt the deal at Doha was there for the taking if only the Americans (and a few others) will get behind it).

The session I ‘facilitated’ followed Ban Ki Moon’s. It started with a highly structured debate.

Then the EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, who was on my panel, turned to me and whispered: “This is boring – get them to stop reading.”

So I did, I banned all pre-prepared scripts as delegates and panellists had simply been reading from prepared statements.

Suddenly the whole thing lit up and people said what they meant.

Sounds boring I know, and in some ways it was, but it was a fascinating insight into power, powerlessness and the state of global institutions in a globalised world where globalization itself has run into such thunderstorms.

I will do another session today – likely to be far more interesting, to which I will return in my next Snowblog.