Development and aid — those are the only big subjects left to the G8 gathering. Not the world economic crisis; that needs the G20, or more compactly, a direct discussion between the US and China about the former’s deficits and the latter’s savings. Not wars; those belong to Nato, the United Nations Security Council and the White House. No — the last role for this gathering of rich countries (plus Russia) is to hand out wealth to poor countries. Only one problem: they’re no longer rich and they don’t have money to spare.

The financial crisis, the Afghan conflict and other security fears are doing some strange things to the philosophy of development laid out by Tony Blair, Bono and other world leaders at the 2005 Gleneagles G8. “Make Poverty History” is still there as a slogan, just. But many of the Millennium Development Goals, a constuction of Kofi Annan while UN Secretary-General, and always an awkward mixture of precise targets and meaningless assertions, are fading into unachievability, although no G8 government is going to come out and say that.

Population growth in some countries of sub-Saharan Africa, while mentioned in only a muted way by the development community, if at all, has been a huge impediment, requiring economies to grow at several per cent a year just to keep poverty levels the same. So has the agnosticism - veering into self-doubt - in the World Bank and other big donors, after half a century of patchy success.

The Government’s new White Paper on Development, out this month, does a modern job of dodging these discomforts. You need a strong stomach for phrases such as “investing in connectivity”, and for its constant self-praise. It is not strictly true that the word “moral” occurs more often than pound signs, but it seems like it.

But the paper does indeed mark a shift. Britain still aims to raise its aid spending to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product (although forecasts for British GDP have fallen, but we don’t need to go into that). That is no mean commitment. However, a higher proportion will now go to Afghanistan, Pakistan and other conflicts, and more to climate change. There will be less, by implication, for sub-Saharan Africa. That is not why Lord Malloch-Brown, minister for Africa and Asia, announced yesterday that he would be leaving the Government, but the timing is apt.

This shift was inevitable once Britain ran out of money. Better swing aid money towards the Afghan war, Britain’s biggest foreign policy headache. This completely confounds the the ethos of the Department for International Development, as conceived by Clare Short, which was hostile to working towards national military or foreign policy goals. Dfid has seen itself as pure, free of those taints. But that has become an unaffordable luxury. Another tranche of aid, the paper says, will be directed towards climate change, which partly overlaps with development goals but is also one of Gordon Brown’s passions.

The Tories, who have pledged to maintain aid levels, were likely to make this shift, many speculated. Brown beat them to it.

Who will now put money into sub-Saharan Africa? China looks like filling the space left by the retreating G8 countries, with no qualms about tying its injections of huge amounts of cash to resources deals and other flanks of national interest. But it is not part of this week’s gathering - yet another way in which this week’s talk will seem peripheral to the big global story.

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