The most eye-catching spectacle from today’s bumper package of Middle Eastern talks in London will be Tony Blair and Gordon Brown meeting in public for the first time since Brown became Prime Minister.

The most substantial (if it happens) will be the pledge of more money for Palestinians from Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia — or, more accurately, the delivery of more of their unfulfilled past pledges. Even better would be agreement on access in and out of Gaza for Palestinians and for aid.

There will be an enormous amount of action, beginning in the morning at Lancaster House and sprawling out through the day in a series of talks. They culminate in a statement on Iran by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and the Blair and Brown show, as the former Prime Minister competes with the present one to show his immersion in the details of the shattered Palestinian economy.

Today’s activity will be vacuous, in the sense that firm pledges or signs of progress will be largely absent. Not much progress could probably be made in any case before the American presidential election.

That does not make the effort meaningless. The deteriorating conditions of Palestinians in Gaza, to give just one reason, mean that the situation cannot be left until then. It will also be helpful for the new US president to face some kind of structure of talks, even if it is making no progress, rather than to have to pick up the pieces of another failure.

Today’s bustle begins in Lancaster House with a meeting of the Quartet — the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — the first significant meeting for five months. The Quartet meets Arab ministers. Then, the centrepiece of the day, there is a meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for the Palestinian Authority, a Norwegian initiative set up in 1992 as part of the Oslo peace process to ensure that development aid is used well. Later there will be a meeting on curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, in diplomatic jargon, of the “E3 plus three” — Britain, France and Germany, together with the US, Russia and China.

Finally, at 5pm, Blair and Brown will meet at a ceremony in a Mayfair hotel to talk about details for revitalising the Palestinian economy (Britain has pledged £243 million over three years). It is the working title of Blair’s current job but a subject in which Brown claims a particular interest (he has seized it as one of the few, technical routes by which he might claim to make a special contribution to this most well-trodden region of diplomacy). Good luck to them both, you might say; it is an all-but-impossible area in the absence of political progress.

What is missing from this panorama of the Middle East? Iraq, in one sense. But if sticking strictly to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, then there are two glaring omissions. First is any plan for dealing with Hamas, within the Palestinian Government or outside. Secondly is any sign by Israel for compromising on West Bank settlement expansion, and any account by the US of how it will respond.

The familiar deadlock then, but still not futile to try to improve conditions, even if any real progress will have to wait a year.

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