In recent months, Gordon Brown has done his level best to sound like a man who would be marching on Gleneagles with Bob Geldof next month to insist on justice for Africa, if only his job didn't somehow prevent it.
He was at it again today, reiterating his call for a Marshall Plan for Africa, more comprehensively outlined in the Commission for Africa report.
Even Tony Blair goes all misty and lefty when the subject of debt cancellation comes up. His welcome message on the Gleneagles G8 website, with its soft focus on aid for Africa and action on climate change, makes you wonder what all those would-be protesters are thinking, pestering the nice man.
Geldof, of course, is essentially supportive of Blair and Brown, as it is their report that proposed a doubling of aid and the cancellation of multilateral debt funded by IMF gold reserves. But that hasn't stopped him calling for a mass demonstration in Scotland following the Live 8 concerts.
To Geldof at least, it seems obvious that the real target of the demonstration is George Bush. The US president wants debt cancellation paid out of direct aid budgets and opposes the international finance facility, Brown's mechanism for frontloading massive amounts of aid money in an attempt to kickstart the millennium development goal of halving poverty by 2015.
With Geldof's expletive-laden enthusiasm and Blair's desperate quest for a legacy other than Iraq, it could be Africa's year - even without Bush's support.
But a demonstration to support Blair? That will strike many intending to descend on Scotland as anathema.
If anything from Africa to Iraq, from ID cards to Guantánamo, from carbon emissions to global labour rights, is on your mind, Dissent! has a handy guide to protests around the G8 summit and the preceding meeting of justice and interior ministers in Sheffield.
G8 Alternatives has more, and Indymedia has still more. Off you go.
