Politicians will be moved from the luxury Gleneagles Hotel to the castle 20 miles away if their safety is considered at risk or if the protests turn into riots and make it impossible for summit business to take place as planned.

The plan for the fall-back venue — built by one of Admiral Nelson’s most senior officers and now the home of Scotland’s police college — would mean Tony Blair hosting the summit over one day rather than the original 48 hours.

If the college at Tulliallan, in Fife, subsequently becomes a focus for protest and its security is breached or at risk, the final option is to switch the world leaders to Lancaster House in London.

The college is set in 90 acres of parkland and has been used to train Scotland's police officers since 1954.

It includes a conference centre but does not have the kind of security fencing that are going to be used for Gleneagles. Instead, the college would be ringed with a human shield of police officers.

Thousands of protesters are expected to target Gleneagles and the nearby village of Auchterarder, Perthshire, next Wednesday when the summit begins. Around 10,600 officers, half of them from England, will be co-ordinated from a centre in Glenrothes, Fife.

Joiners and workmen have been boarding up shopfronts on Auchterarder High Street because the owners fears that violence will break out.

Tulliallan Castle is a 160-year-old mixture of Gothic and Italian style architecture. It was built for George Keith Elphinstone, Admiral Lord Keith, one-time senior officer of Nelson, from money received from prize ships, by a labour force said to include French prisoners of war. Negotiations are under way between Bob Geldof and Downing Street to allow the Live8 organiser to meet G8 leaders at Gleneagles either next Wednesday or the following day.

While Downing Street would not confirm this yesterday, it is understood that an alternative plan would involve the world leaders seeing a video of Geldof and the Make Poverty History campaign.

Jack McConnell, the Scottish First Minister, yesterday attacked what he said was the “wasteful, greedy and materialistic” desires of Western society as he urged G8 leaders to transform Africa’s fortunes next week. He told an academic conference on the G8 held at Glasgow University that debt relief for some of the world’s poorest countries must not be underwritten with existing aid funds.

Hopes that Mr Blair will achieve a breakthrough to tackle global warming played down yesterday by Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, who said it would be “absolutely wrong” to expect new targets on climate change for the world’s richest nations from the G8 summit.

Britain’s long-term goal was to “stabilise” greenhouse gas emissions from the United States and developing nations such as China and India, Mrs Beckett said.

“The ultimate goal of UK and international climate policy is to stabilise the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” she said. “It is an ambitious but vital challenge — perhaps the greatest challenge facing the global community, as the Prime Minister has said.”

Mrs Beckett accused environmental campaigners and others who were calling for new targets for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions of making an “appalling error”.

“It is not the G8 who set targets and take decisions for the world community.

“That is done through the UN Convention, which meets every year and will meet at the end of this year in Montreal, where I will be the lead negotiator for the European Union,” she told BBC Radio 4‘s The World at One. “It would be absolutely wrong to try to second-guess or have a second process from that and that’s not what we’ve ever intended to do.”

Her comments came as a leading Blairite said that a deal to tackle poverty in Africa must not eclipse action on climate change at the summit. Stephen Byers, the former Trade Secretary, said that progress on Africa would not be enough if the leading industrial nations failed to make headway on halting global warming.

“We cannot divorce climate change from what is happening in Africa,” Mr Byers said. “The G8 next week cannot take pride in action on Africa unless it does something about climate change.

“If left unchecked, global warming would condemn more people in Africa to poverty.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Madonna and her Guy decide it’s over
• Terror police target internet phone calls
• Red squirrels develop immunity to grey plague