The global Centre Left has a new star: Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister. Together with Bill Clinton, the ageing, but still crowd-pulling, superstar former US President, Mr Rudd took the limelight at the weekend’s “Progressive Governance” meeting at The Grove Hotel near Watford. Yet even their efforts could not mask the doubts and uncertainties of the Centre Left.

The two-day event was a hybrid of a conference organised by the Policy Network think-tank and a summit of heads of government and international organisations (observed by about 200 of us). It was originally a Blairite initiative but has been embraced by Gordon Brown, the host this weekend. The public discussions on such occasions can be stilted but they revealed the interplay of the leaders and their mood.

Mr Brown was in his element, talking to a sympathetic audience about global economic problems, climate change and reform of international institutions. He spoke without notes, fluently and wittily, and chaired the summit of 11 other leaders in a relaxed way. It was a style that his advisers wish they could transfer to domestic politics.

Yet, unusually, he was out “policy wonked” by Mr Rudd, who combined the high hopes of recent electoral triumph (like Tony Blair in 1997-98) with an incisive and practical grasp of the main policy issues (more than Mr Blair then had). But he still has a tendency to talk in unpolitical ways about the “literature” and “the academy”. He was treated immediately as a big player.

The leaders and advisers were from the pro-globalisation, pro-free-trade Left, with no unreconstructed French or German socialists in sight. But, for the first time since Mr Clinton and Mr Blair began their Third Way shift in the early 1990s, there was a sense of doubt that this openness could be maintained.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, noted that most of the downside risks in its economic forecasts had materialised, while China, India and Brazil would suffer from the slowdown elsewhere. All agreed on the importance of completing the Doha round soon to provide a boost to confidence.

There was much worry about the rise in protectionism in America, particularly as expressed in the race for the Democratic nomination. But US voices were absent until the appearance of Mr Clinton, fresh from campaigning, as he put it, for “my candidate in North Carolina”. As always with a knack of bringing elevated policy discussions down to earth with specific examples, he sought to explain anti-free-trade views by the squeeze on jobs and incomes in recent years.

Yet there were elements of unreality: no mention of either Tibet or Zimbabwe at the formal summit sesssions, although they surfaced at the news conference. And Mr Brown divorced global issues from domestic problems — although these dominated conversations outside the meetings.

Awkward political realities cannot be postponed for long by the cocoon of a summit.

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