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The propensity of the British press to deal with foreign news as the pursuit of domestic news by other means was in full flow on Monday 2 June. After a weekend of summitry in St Petersburg, Paris and finally the G8 'rich club' in Evian, there were few signs in the dailies that the leaders of China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Malaysia and several other countries had been there at all - let alone what their names are. Still less would you have known that the G8 were supposed to be redeeming the pledges they made at previous summits - on world poverty and Third World debt in particular. Well all right, Tony Blair did call Sir Bob Geldof in Ethiopia.
As for the accompanying protests, thousands of people were apparently incapable of speaking in anything other than slogans or doing anything other than looting a petrol station. There was only passing reference to the terrible injuries inflicted on at least two civilians.
The slickest front page came from The Times: 'Ice-cold in Evian: a portrait of the entente glaciale.' Its coverage of the first public encounter between Presidents Bush and Chirac since the Iraq war was accompanied by a picture of Blair grimacing beside Chirac. On page 13 there was an analysis of body language by a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Durham: 'M Chirac appears almost to evade the American's space,' he concluded.
Like the other broadsheets, The Financial Times headlined the row over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to which the G8 summit seemed largely incidental. Its front-page picture showed Chirac and Bush looking determinedly in opposite directions.
The Telegraph had Blair and Chirac facing each other in profile - with eyes half-closed you could almost imagine a chess piece in the space between them. Its second leader informed us, without explanation: 'America has played a leading role in poverty reduction in Africa.' Since there has been no poverty reduction in Africa, quite what America's leading role in it might have been remained unclear.
Idiosyncratic as ever, the front page of The Independent featured a close-up of corn on the cob. Relegated to page 2, coverage of the G8 identified a new breed of 'altermondialistes' or 'otherworldists'. Their slogan? 'They are eight. We are billions.' 'Actually,' the reporter added, 'there seem to be about 80 of them.'
The Guardian pictured Chirac and Bush in profile again, one behind the other, and an extreme close-up of their handshake. You could at least learn that on Sunday's huge demonstration, scarcely reported elsewhere, there were no police - and no violence either. Economics editor Larry Elliott, in a witheringly brilliant feature, suggested that 'there is little virtue in a talkfest if the participants are not talking to each other'.
'Saddam's girls want asylum,' yelled the front page of the The Sun - on the principle, perhaps, that two hates are better than one. On page 2 Trevor Kavanagh claimed that Blair and Bush 'ambushed' Chirac and stole his prestige.
When you got to page 4 of The Mirror you learned that the young British man who was seriously injured had a name after all: Martin Shaw.
