Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma’s CHOGM diary

It is sometimes hard to accept, in the thick of an international summit, that there might be other news stories emanating, from other parts of the world. My Blackberry buzzes: today brought good news of further Chinese commitments on the road to Copenhagen.

Such are the perils of the ‘All Staff’ email, that I also opened a message during the coffee break of the Foreign Ministers Meeting, intriguingly entitled ‘Trouser Amnesty’. This revealed the distressing news that one of my colleagues in the Commonwealth Secretariat has mislaid his trousers. In good Commonwealth style, the hand of friendship has been offered rather than that of accusation: should the trousers be found and returned, ‘no questions will be asked’.

Meanwhile the climate change debate raged among the Foreign Ministers – a meeting which I was to go in and out of, throughout the day. It was broken by a short press conference with PM Manning at midday, preparations for tomorrow’s Leaders’ Retreat, and a BBC and a Sky interview in the evening, the latter in a studio coloured so red that I half-expected to hear melancholy piano strains from the back of the boudoir.

At the press conference, the Prime Minister was most vocal when answering the Trinidadian questions: he gave short shrift to the idea that culpability for the depletion of the ozone layer could be apportioned on a per capita basis. Trinidad may be in the top ten polluting countries in the world if that is how you measure it, and it is proud of its industrialized status and its aluminium plants, but it cannot be mentioned in the same breath as a China or a US, said the Prime Minister.

I also looked around in the audience, and saw several Chinese journalists. I often note from my daily press digest in London that the Chinese media assiduously follows the work of the Commonwealth, especially in Africa. The geopolitical world is changing; the G8 gives way to the G20; and the Chinese Dragon, well, flies. It also uses Commonwealth Debt Recording and Management Software, as do Afghanistan and Kosovo, and 11 other non-Commonwealth countries. This is as it should be – our only sense of proprietary pride is to wish to see the offerings of the great global good that is the Commonwealth, spread far and wide. Bilateral and multilateral debt relief were Commonwealth ideas (they were hatched at Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meetings, in 1987 and 1997), and others took the baton and ran, to the tune of over $110 billion of debt relief, and counting. We were delighted; our poorer members, shackled neck and ankles by debt, even more so.

A long and unhappy night ensued at the Foreign Ministers Meeting. Foreign Ministers were keen to have a draft climate change text on which they could agree, to be presented to Heads the next day. Initially, there was none: PM Manning wanted a clean sheet for his counterparts, and indeed his visitors. Ultimately, the Ministers had their draft, and gave it their imprint. We are a consensual, reasoning and reasonable body, which will hear the views of all, and only move in unison. There was no unison at the meeting, or if there was, it was in the cause of Ministers wishing to discharge their democratic responsibility. The Commonwealth was cracking on the substance of climate change negotiation, as well as on the processes of discussing it.

A foray from the Meeting Room to check the preparations for the Leaders’ retreat tomorrow – how, without the actual use of geometry sets, to arrange 53 sizeable armchairs in a room, while allowing everyone to have sight of each other without binoculars? – provided scant relief. I sense, though, that it was less painful for me and my immediate team, than for the shoeless electrician forced to rip up at least 20 microphone wires taped to the carpet, and start again.

I returned to the Foreign Ministers Meeting at the Hilton at 1.15 a.m, and entered as fractious a meeting as I have ever attended. The dinner break had had no good effects: there must have been something in the soup. Leaving the meeting at 3 a.m., knowing that I had to be on parade three and three-quarters hours later, my consolations were two-fold. One, I had my trousers. And not those of my poor, trouserless colleague in London. Two, tomorrow is another day. The Queen is with us: something of her grace never fails to be imparted. And the representatives of 51 countries want only one thing from this summit tomorrow: results. They must have them.