Alan Watkins: Top of the bill, but with the same old act

These days I tend to give these events a wide berth. The accommodation is scattered, expensive and scarce. There are always difficulties with transport. The ladies and gentlemen of the press are corralled like beasts of the field. They are occasionally pushed and prodded by "security". True, I was once given a CD entitled Mozart in Salzburg, though the conference in question was being held somewhere else, but I gave it away to a friend.

In the early 1970s, I went to a few conferences. They were held in Luxembourg and Strasbourg, and were connected with the Conservative government attempt – successful, as it turned out – to get us into Europe. The chief negotiator was a now-forgotten Tory lawyer called Geoffrey Rippon.

We would interrupt him during his sustaining breakfast at the Holiday Inn. The French, he would say, were proving difficult, but Ted (a reference to Edward Heath, the prime minster) and Pompidou (the French president) would be able to sort it out in the end.

So it proved. Somehow I do not think it would be possible today to chat to the chief British negotiator when he was having his breakfast in a hotel. "Security" would intervene, if they had not done so already.

For no good reason, European negotiations would continue throughout the night. The other distinguishing feature was the press conference, often several of them, conducted by the national government concerned.

At the Maastricht conference in 1991 this practice assumed monstrous proportions. The nation-state that was involved (sometimes represented by a minister, more often by a press officer) would invariably boast of its success. I took to attending the French press conferences to try to improve my French, and the Irish, where the late Charles Haughey and his subordinates would be more entertaining than their equivalents from the United Kingdom.

Certainly the old villain Haughey was livelier than John Major. I think it was a press officer rather than Sir John (as he later became) who coined or adopted the phrase "game, set and match" to describe the outcome of the Maastricht negotiations. It was a vainglorious boast but, for a time, it caught on. Sir John was not exactly the hero of the hour but he did manage to win the 1992 election.

The Maastricht Treaty was not the sole cause of the Conservative government's subsequent troubles but it was clearly one of them. Sir John's mistake – and it was a conscientious, even principled mistake – was to take the entire debate on the floor of the House of Commons.

It is not an error that Mr Gordon Brown is likely to make. The ratification of the Lisbon Treaty was regarded by the present government

as a cure for insomnia. In any case, the recent summit was not a programme for legislation. It is much more serious than that. Mr Brown is trying to restore himself to the position which he occupied for a few months after last autumn and for an even shorter period after he took over No 10, before he cancelled the election and inaugurated a horrible year for himself.

My feeling is that, this time, it is not going to work. In a previous age, politicians had a set act. They were like comedians in the old music hall. They would spend years, even decades, in perfecting their performance. It still goes on. Comics still tell the same joke, varying the location from, say, Clacton to Scarborough, depending on where the performance is taking place. Television has killed all that.

Mr Brown has now taken his act to a bigger theatre, surrounded by an even more glittering cast, at least one of whom is far more renowned than he is. The rush to touch the hem of Mr Barack Obama's suit was unseemly in its haste. Mr David Cameron was allotted half an hour with the great man, and seemed grateful for the privilege. Politicians, being as they are, I should not have expected Mr Cameron to keep his distance, though it would have been nice if he had tried.

But Mr Nick Clegg, who was not given so much as a sausage on a stick, could have maintained a lofty silence; instead of which he complained about being excluded from the brief company of the president. Mr Clegg would have done better to boast of his close acquaintance with Mr Vince Cable who has a more accurate record of forecasting trouble ahead than Mr Brown – or, for that matter, than Mr Obama.

The cast has become more glamorous but the act remains the same. It contains two ingredients. One is that the Conservatives are the "do nothing" party. The other is that Mr Brown has a fund of experience. He is, in the caption of the old Punch cartoon (not that anyone now remembers that often dismal magazine) the pilot who weathered the storm.

The first ingredient – Conservative inaction – still retains some flavour. Indeed, the present government echoes Margaret Thatcher's administration after 1979 with two questions: what is the alternative? and what would you do? Mr Cameron's single answer is that he believes in being prudent and in not getting any further into debt than is necessary. Alas, Mr Brown assures us that it is necessary, though Mr Alistair Darling has his reservations, while Mr Mervyn King is more doubtful still.

The second ingredient – Mr Brown's long experience – is, I fear, a diminishing asset. All or nearly all the measures that Mr Brown and his ministers have proclaimed since the autumn, have, in one way or another, come unstuck.

Politics remains an irrational activity. In 1961 a handsome young president, J F Kennedy, filled the western world with hope. He proceeded to justify armed intervention in any country on the planet, much as the younger George Bush was to do after him, and virtually every other leader was to do likewise in the intervening period. Kennedy brought the Cold War to the heights of intensity and, with the war in Laos originated the conflict in Vietnam. And then he was murdered.

Politicians like to emphasise the cheerful side of things. The Stock Exchange has been growing up in the past few days, less because of any measures announced by Mr Brown and his assorted group of world leaders (some of whom I would not care to meet on a murky night) than because of a feeling in the air.

I watched the proceedings on television. At the Palace, it must have been like the grand ball the Duchess of Richmond gave at Brussels before the Battle of Waterloo.