They're Playing His Song

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Usually I dread the G-8. for a journalist, it's the ultimate BOGSAT: a Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table. The guys do happen to lead the world's richest countries, but any really interesting exchanges at their annual get-togethers tend to get saved for their memoirs. Instead, we are treated to a ritual photo of the leaders in funny shirts to dress up a turgid communiqué, disgorged at a press center far, far from the action. But this year's meeting, at the Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland at the start of July, feels different. Alongside the tired ritual, there's some real politics going on.

It's not just the politics of protest, for which the G-8 became infamous four years ago during riots in Genoa, forcing levels of security that would make Kim Jong Il blush. There will be protest, possibly flamboyant. The rock singer Bob Geldof has called for a million people to make their way to Edinburgh to campaign for Africa's poor. He even wants another Dunkirk of small boats to ferry activists across the English Channel; much better TV than taking Ryanair. Geldof is also mounting a worldwide string of "Live 8" concerts the weekend before to unleash a flood of public concern for Africa he hopes will induce the Gleneagles crew to write some bigger aid checks. But the interesting thing is how much kabuki has entered the relationship between the protesters and the guys in suits. They are using each other, and enjoying it.

One leader of a development charity, who doesn't want to be named for fear of alienating the British government, calls the whole lead-up to the G-8 "reverse lobbying": politicians like British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown have deliberately invited pressure from rock stars like Geldof and U2's Bono to make it easier for them to persuade voters to spend more on aid, and to make it more embarrassing for relatively recalcitrant countries like the U.S. and Germany to keep their wallets shut.

Behind the scenes, the coordination among 10 Downing Street, the British Treasury and the activists — though they don't always see eye to eye — is constant and intense. Geldof came up with the idea for the Africa Commission that Blair enthusiastically implemented, laying out a detailed program for reform. With the precision of a wizened diplomat, Bono has learned to modulate between gut-wrenching appeals to conscience and public back-pats for leaders like German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who face flak for coughing up too much for Africa. This co-dependency is getting practical results: to start with, some $40 billion in debt relief has been announced, with campaigners hinting that a deal is in the works for a substantial boost in aid to Africa to be uncorked at Gleneagles.

The powerful chemistry at work here is a leading indicator for politics more broadly. Politicians are spending a lot of time pondering the way the stars have learned to use single, powerful issues to tap into people's desire for a better world, the kind of yearnings that used to flow into party politics but now increasingly bypass it — as declining voter turnouts show. Speak to operatives from traditional parties in Britain and the U.S., and you hear frank admiration for the antipoverty campaigners allied to Geldof, Bono and Co. They are global, deeply media savvy and well connected. And they are audacious enough to dream up big schemes — like the plan to promote their trademark white wristband on a vast scale in the days before the G-8 by wrapping enormous white bands around the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Rome's Colosseum, St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Trocadéro buildings in Paris. They've figured out how to connect with people — and changed the political weather in many countries.

How can that be applied to the slog of regular politics, with budgets and targets and murkier moral choices? Changing the political weather in many countries is exactly what Tony Blair wants to do in the wake of the collapse of the European constitution. In a blizzard of speeches, op-eds and interviews in Europe, he's been trying to reach around the punch-drunk institutions of Brussels to persuade skeptical voters that Europe must modernize or atrophy.

Blair loves this role, having perfected it in a career spent admonishing the Labour Party to shape up, but it's a definite departure in European politics. It used to be only the U.S. President who would jet around the world telling other countries how to organize themselves. Blair has no backup band of celebrities to help him make his case for European reform, though. But compared to the other leaders of the G-8, who are mostly lame ducks struggling to stay in power, Blair looks like a rock star himself, a happy warrior exultant at the prospect of forcing a debate over Europe's future. He may well lose. Still, he has the initiative, and you can bet the G-8 is not going to be another dull bogsat, but a powerful vehicle for amplifying his views. The other leaders would be smart to take notes on his technique.