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FALMOUTH, England — The helicopters have left the luxury Carbis Bay resort. The broadcast satellite trucks are packing up. The G7 communiqué has been issued.
Boris Johnson’s VIP seaside weekend is over. But how did he do? Was Global Britain’s first big outing on the world stage a triumph or a flop? In the spirit of holidaymakers leaving a Cornish guesthouse, here’s POLITICO’s rating for the G7 summit host:
Location
Choosing a location is meant to boost tourism, draw attention to the summit itself with some photogenic scenery and make the host nation seem highly competent.
Review: You could hardly hope for a more idyllic setting than Cornwall, with its dramatic sea views, green hills and sunsets to die for. Unfortunately, the Cornish vistas were hard to make out on arrival, as they were shrouded in mist and drizzle. The stunning planned location of St Michael’s Mount for Johnson’s meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden had to be ditched on Thursday due to the persistent mizzle keeping helicopters grounded. That was probably for the best given the potential for Remainer-style jokes about Johnson being marooned on a remote island cut off by the tide.
Some attendees were bemused to discover that the holding pen for journalists was over an hour away from Carbis Bay, where the leaders’ discussions were actually taking place. It was ever thus, one or two seasoned hacks sighed, but it was undeniable that you had to go quite a long way to speak to anyone who wasn’t a journalist. Not a great look for Team Democracy.
But once the sun came out, which it did in splendid fashion on Saturday, the setting really came into its own. It beats sitting in your living room all day on Zoom and no mistake.
Rating:
***
Food
Keeping one’s guests fed and watered is a vital part of any host’s responsibilities, and the G7 was no exception.
Review: Have you really been to Cornwall if you haven’t had a pasty? The event organizers didn’t want us to take the risk of finding out, handing them to hungry journalists for free. The queen, as usual, upstaged everyone at Friday’s reception by demanding a ceremonial sword to cut the cake. The Duchess of Cornwall, meanwhile, rendered herself highly relatable with an enormous glass of wine.
For the summit’s esteemed invitees, the weekend was quite the feast. There was spiced melon and gazpacho, roasted turbot and pavlova on Friday night, and on Saturday night a barbecue on the beach with hot buttered rum and marshmallows — all of which led Johnson to quip that they had been putting the carbs into Carbis Bay. Definitely not on the menu: sausages.
Rating:
***
Activities
The gathering of the G7 was all about hard work, of course, but that doesn’t mean leaders and their spouses didn’t find themselves with the odd moment of downtime.
Review: Johnson wanted us to be in no doubt about his commitment to his fitness regime, and was up early for a run and a dip in the sea every morning. Not to be outdone, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was spotted jogging up and down the beach in blustery Carbis Bay “at quite a pace” on Friday morning.
Carrie Johnson hosted a spousal excursion to the nearby Minnack Theatre, which is built on the side of a cliff overlooking the sea, and Jill Biden was invited to feed some carrots to a rabbit for reasons nobody quite understood. As if that were not enough excitement, the guests were treated to sea shanties on the beach at Saturday’s barbecue. No word yet on whether any of them felt moved to attempt a TikTok lip sync.
Rating:
***
Conversation
They say religion and politics are the two topics you should avoid at social occasions, but there was little hope of escaping the latter in Cornwall.
Review: This weekend the rest of the world got a taste of what life has been like in the U.K. for the past five years: desperately trying to move on from Brexit, yet somehow ending up talking about it anyway. At Carbis Bay that conversation went especially badly, with Boris Johnson reportedly trying to explain his unhappiness with the Northern Ireland protocol by asking his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron what he would do if sausages from Toulouse could not be moved to Paris.
The French president was said to have retorted that this analogy did not work because Paris and Toulouse were both part of the same country, incorrectly suggesting Northern Ireland is not within the U.K. All hell predictably broke loose, with U.K. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab calling the comments “offensive” and the Elysee trying to clarify Macron meant they were not in the same “single geographic area.” Somebody set up a Brexit swear jar for next time.
Rating:
***
Company
Planning the guestlist for these occasions is never easy, and the U.K. put a fair amount of thought into its choices.
Review: This G7 summit had the president of the United States, the queen, and David Attenborough. You can’t say much fairer than that. Sadly Marcus Rashford was otherwise engaged, or we might have been approaching a full house on dream dinner party invites — though perhaps the England footballer and social justice campaigner would not have been top of Johnson’s list in any case.
Rating:
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