Rather than lauding the settlement on poverty, the PM should have been calling on G8 leaders to honour their promises

It was bad luck for Gordon Brown that media excitement about the items on a lavish eight-course banquet at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, coincided with his announcement at home urging people to beat the crisis of rising prices by not throwing away £8 worth of uneaten food a week. He had, possibly, hoped to be seen as a man aware of the spiralling costs of feeding a family.

But it was bad judgement (his own or his advisers') that his remarks instead made him appear, as too often he does, aloof, patronising even, and out of touch with the lives of voters. Of course we should try not to waste food, but however fashionable doing clever things with leftovers becomes among the not-so-strapped middle classes, lectures from politicians about frugality go down equally badly with rich and poor.

Home cooking and shopping for food every day are luxuries of time that few parents can afford. Most can only hope their children finish the deteriorating "bogof" (buy one, get one free) fruit and veg offers before the next weekly shop.

More worrying, though, is that No 10 decided to launch its policy document Food Matters with this pound-in-your-pocket sort of soundbite. Brown's, after all, is the first government in decades to recognise that we need a joined-up policy on food (including its carbon footprint) from producer to table, and cannot leave it to the giant food concerns. Could he not trust voters to understand this?

A similar lack of trust in the electorate dogs Brown's efforts to communicate on the global crises of the day - as if the deliberations of the G8 were beyond the understanding or outside the interests of food-wasting Brits at home. This is simply daft, for if Brown does have something to sell, it is his record of sound economic management over 11 years, along with a confident grasp of the macroeconomic issues now facing the world - qualities distinctly absent from the insubstantial opposition front bench and from among the gang of opportunistic backbenchers in his own party, offering mid-20th-century remedies for 21st-century problems.

On page 10, Gordon Brown tells Gloria De Piero of his frustration with the knockabout politics of Prime Minister's Questions and the way in which it prevents informed debate about serious issues such as climate change.

But when the G8 offered the Prime Minister an opportunity for such an informed debate and a chance to show himself as a strong, principled leader, he hardly seized it with enthusiasm. Deals at Hokkaido on poverty and climate change disappointed developing countries and NGOs alike. Brown's position on these issues is well known, and certainly closer to theirs than it is to that of his fellow G8 leaders. Yet he declared the agreements the leaders reached on both issues as breakthroughs, which, clearly, they are not.

Brown, as much as Tony Blair, was strongly identified with the 2005 G8 Gleneagles summit pledge to make poverty history. This was to have been achieved by increasing aid levels by $50bn a year by 2010, with $25bn specifically to Africa. Few countries are on track with this promise, but Britain is. Rather than lauding the settlement, he should have urged, and publicly, the US, France, Germany and Italy, all falling behind, to honour their pledges.

And then there is climate change itself, cause for much self-congratulation among G8 leaders after they reached agreement to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. Brown called it progress. But he knows it falls lamentably short of what is needed. The targets are based on current output (not the 1990s level as called for by the EU). More worrying is the timescale, which gives important rich-country polluters decades to carry on as now. Individual countries will decide their own timetable for interim targets. The Prime Minister's public enthusiasm for this disappointing deal cannot be sincere. It suggests a desperation to claim success, rather than a genuine belief that G8 leaders have done the right thing.

Brown, as the NS interview reveals, is a politician with genuine convictions. He has to start showing them. And believing that voters may also share some of them.

Stop the cereal name changing

Tilda Swinton is displeased by the decision to change the name of New Hall, Cambridge, to Murray Edwards College, after the woman who founded it in 1954, Dame Rosemary Murray, and its new US benefactors, Ros and Steve Edwards. Now Swinton and more than 60 other alumnae have written to the college president to complain.

At least "Murray Edwards College" doesn't sound too bad. Over at Oxford, it is not generally considered that the dignity of Rewley House was particularly enhanced when its name was changed to Kellogg College, remarkable man though the inventor of the cornflake undoubtedly was.

One sympathises with the protesters, for there is both an understandable attachment to historic titles and an irritation with those that speak to "a word from our sponsor".

Despite the airline's best efforts, few people ever referred to the "British Airways London Eye". Although the Man Group has taken over sponsorship of the Booker Prize, many continue to use the old title (even though it refers to a cash-and-carry firm and has no literary association). And all pale in comparison to the endlessly changing Football League Cup, variously named after Littlewoods, Carling, Rumbelows, Coca-Cola, Worthington and even the Milk Marketing Board.

New Hall, in that perversely English way, has the smack of antiquity about it. Let's leave it be, and have no more words from our sponsors - or even our benefactors.

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