Incidentally, oil prices soared from $14.54 to $18 a barrel while they were meeting in Tokyo in 1979. They start 10 times higher in Japan. Let's hope they don't rise another 24 per cent before the jamboree is over. Otherwise, there will be an international move to ban it.

They would have a strong case since the second item on the agenda this week is free trade and, indirectly, food prices. It was the same in Tokyo in 1979. It was often the predominant issue at my 11 G7 summits as British Government spokesman in the 1980s.

Free trade has been the subject of more pious global declarations than even global warming. This is because, like global warming,
it is easy to be for doing something about it in principle but damned difficult in practice, especially as they all subsidise their farmers.

To shame them all, Thatcher produced what was called Howe's Cow in Toronto in 1988 to show how each nation subsidised each cow peacefully grazing on the green, green grass of home, while contributing, as it turned out, to climate change with every burp.

So my advice to all those facing roaring inflation, dearer food, dwindling real incomes, threats of redundancy and fiendish difficulty in getting a mortgage is not to repose much hope in this week's deliberations on Lake Toya in Hokkaido.

Whatever communiqué they cook up for the attendant media camp followers who traverse the world in their thousands for their annual dose of guff, history shows that not much will result. I can think of only one memorable G7 summit in my time – in the largest log cabin in the world in the forests of Montebello near Ottawa in 1981 – when Thatcher and Ronald Reagan weaned their colleagues off tinkering with their economies in favour of sound fundamentals.

That single summit helped to produce around 25 years of rising prosperity in the developed world, give or take a few busts. That was no mean achievement but, as is the way of the world, the old lessons are forgotten and pendulums swing to extremes.

After the latest swing into over-indulgence, things now seem so bleak that our eight summiteers are going to look more like Nero fiddling while Rome burns than statesmen crafting a more sustainable future for us all.

After all, George Bush is a lame duck president, Stephen Harper leads a minority Canadian Government, Angela Merkel heads an uncomfortable German coalition, the chairman, Yasuo Fukuda, is insecurely placed in Japan's inscrutable political system and Dmitry Medvedev is apparently a mere Russian front for Putin's power.

Apart from our very own Gordon Brown, that leaves only Silvio Berlusconi, pre-occupied with cleaning up Italy, and Nicolas Sarkozy, with four years ahead of him but as unpredictable as he is protectionist.

Would you put your trust in that job lot? More to the point, can you put your trust in Gordon Brown when his imprudence has helped us get into our version of the global mess? His message
to the G8 shows he is as schizophrenic as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He says no matter what the present circumstances, they must not let up on combating global warming and on global development.

To give him credit, he certainly has the right ideas about developing nuclear power and promoting free trade. But he also advocates wasting £100bn in the UK alone on useless wind power and on chucking billions at Africa, its sadistic dictators and all, presumably in the name of Christian charity. Both are a recipe for waste and disaster in a West strapped for cash while Russia coins it from oil and gas.

In truth, it is probably impossible for G8 leaders just to let stratospheric oil prices do their work and force the world economy to adjust – as it will.

For all bar Medvedev, that would mean either impotently or callously, depending on your point of view, leaving your people to adapt to the new reality. In their politically weak state – as most of them are – they no doubt feel they can't sit on their hands.

So expect G8 tinkering elevated to new heights of pretence in Hokkaido today. As the man said: "Life gets tedious, don't it?"