M40 M42 M6 G20

"So, darling, how's your week looking?"

"So-so. I've got a meeting on Thursday."

"Oh, that's a bore. Where is it?"

"London."

"London!?"

"I know. Got to go to London for a meeting."

"What's it about?"

"Er ... everything, really. It's a meeting about everything. We need to sort everything out, so we've got a meeting about it."

"That might run on."

"Yeah."

This is the sort of conversation I imagine the world's leaders and their spouses having in the run-up to the G20 summit.

"Can I come?"

"What, to the meeting?"

"No, to London. I thought I might come along with you and just, you know, hang out."

"Why?"

"Oh I don't know. There might be a dinner."

"A dinner?"

"Yeah, they might do a dinner for all the wives and Angela Merkel's husband. Dame Kelly Holmes and JK Rowling might be there."

"That doesn't sound very likely."

"I bet there'll be a dinner. Naomi Campbell and Martha Lane Fox might be there. Come on, you never ask me along to anything."

"Haven't you got things of your own you need to be doing?"

"As is still the convention with politicians' wives, I totally don't."

And so the wives and Angela Merkel's husband start making plans while the husbands and Angela Merkel make mollifying phone calls to their mistresses and whoever Angela Merkel might be having an affair with. Let's say it's Jacqui Smith's husband - we know he likes fun.

"It might be a chance for us to spend a bit of time alone together," continues the wife or Angela Merkel's husband.

"Right."

"What?"

"A hundred other people are coming."

"A hundred other people?"

"Yeah, I'm bringing a hundred people from the office. To help out."

"Doesn't that constitute an invasion? Are we invading Britain now?"

"Everyone's doing it. Obama's bringing five times that."

"What do you need them all for?"

"Loads of things. You know, photocopying, erm ... "

With an entourage of 500, there is no way the American president will have had to do any of his own photocopying last week. Any suggestion that he might photocopy something himself, get his own coffee, brush his own teeth, or even shake his own cock after a wee, will have been met with dismay by the army of support staff and servants feverishly competing for the right to cater to one of his finite number of every needs.

Like a medieval king on a progress, the president is using this retinue to demonstrate his power. "America is still the mightiest country on Earth," he is asserting.

It's a worrying sign that he feels the need to. The US has been going through a bit of a bad patch. He obviously feels that now is not the time to skimp on prestige.

Back when it was the only country with nuclear weapons, an American president could have come to a summit on his own, or with a girlfriend to get off with during the boring bits. If he'd wanted any photocopying done, he'd have got another world leader to do it. But these days, the Americans are reduced to a ludicrous attempt to outnumber the Chinese.

Which must have made for a frustrating few days for his attendants. Riding a wave of presidential cachet and buoyed up by the self-importance that only an Air Force One napkin can give you, they arrive at London's already fully staffed American embassy with very little to do.

Suddenly, they're in a world where securing a meeting with Alastair Darling is a coup. Some of them probably settled for George Osborne, poor sods. But then I suppose it beats standing around watching footage of a window being broken on the news, and taking it in turns to replace toner cartridges.

An apparently healthy man, Obama travelled with six doctors. I hope, for his own sake, that doctor number six brought a book.

But then, after all the razzmatazz, the dinners, the meeting the Queen, the jostling of the entourages, the group photograph, the breaking of the window of that bank, 20 people walk into a room to have a meeting. A meeting about how everything's going wrong and is there any way of stopping it?

How does that work? How do they refrain, as soon as the doors close, from pissing themselves laughing?

"What the hell do those guys out there think we're going to do!?" I imagine them giggling hysterically. "There's an asteroid heading towards the planet and we haven't even got Superman's phone number!"

Does this make them insincere? Are they, as the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson wrote of the delegates at the Congress of Vienna, "mere hucksters in the diplomatic market, bartering the happiness of millions with a scented smile"?

I don't think so - there won't have been much smiling and I can't vouch for their breath. And they're not evil. It's worse than that - they're just a bunch of people having a meeting.

That's what it's come to. Our only hope of saving the world is that a meeting goes well.

A meeting - something that anyone sensible hates and avoids, where nothing ever gets achieved, where the most boring person talks the longest, that runs on for hours and prevents people from getting on with their actual jobs - that's what we're relying on.

The same process by which bypasses are approved and the admin of church fetes discussed. Item one: economic implosion, item two: environmental catastrophe, item three: parking.

In case anyone's wondering, no I don't have a better suggestion. And presumably most of what is agreed at summits is sorted out behind the scenes beforehand. Obama's fourth doctor has a quiet drink with Medvedev's third IT support guy, who knows a bit of maths, and they hammer out the details. It's probably better that way.

"How was your meeting, darling?"

"Long and pointless. I didn't really need to be there."

"What's Nicolas Sarkozy like?"

"His own way."

"No, I mean, as a person."

"Well, remember what you said after meeting Naomi Campbell?"

"Yes, sorry, I really hate that word."

"OK, but he's a massive one."