Globetrotting Gordon heads off to save the world (again)

As the Prime Minister set off for a five-day trip to drum up support for his global economic plans, former Cabinet minister Stephen Byers said the summit could appear irrelevant to the British public struggling with recession.

The senior Blairite called for the Government's VAT cut to be withdrawn and the money spent on taking millions of low-paid workers out of tax altogether.

His remarks came as the Tories attacked Mr Brown for "hobnobbing" abroad while the UK suffered from recession.

After chairing the Cabinet and meeting banking chiefs this morning, Mr Brown set off on a multi-country tour ahead of next month's G20 summit in London.

He was set to make a speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, before going to New York and South America.

Downing Street was buoyed by the massive toxic asset plan unveiled by the Obama administration last night.

"It shows the world coming together to meet a common challenge," a senior source told the Evening Standard. But Mr Byers suggested that the G20 summit was doomed to fail because Mr Brown was trying to tackle too many issues at once.

In an article for the website of the Progress think tank, he said the event would be "make or break time" for the Prime Minister.

He warned that with the Budget it would be decisive to Labour's hopes of re-election. "The difficulty that is now emerging in relation to the G20 is that it is simply too ambitious," he said.

Mr Byers suggested that tackling tax havens and changing global regulation were not priorities for Britain at present.

"The question has to be asked whether the time to consider these important issues is now," he said.

The former Trade and Industry Secretary became the first senior Labour politician to back Tory and Liberal Democrat calls for the 2.5 per cent VAT cut to be reversed.

He said the cut was not benefiting the economy or Labour and added that the £8billion should instead be spent on raising personal allowances for the poorest.

Darren Murphy, a former Downing Street adviser to Tony Blair and Alan Milburn, former health secretary, also claimed that a lack of radical public service reform posed more of a threat to Labour than Mr Brown's global economic ambitions.

He said: "The public will look at the G20 summit and say to themselves, 'that's what politicians' lives are about - meeting and talking'.

"Then they will go back to their own lives as patients and parents, neighbours and carers and wonder just how relevant is the G20 after all".

Shadow foreign minister Keith Simpson said: "At a time when Britain is deep in recession with more than two million people unemployed, Gordon Brown is once again jetting off out of the country to try to save the world."

Mr Byers said that "the political danger" for Mr Brown at the summit was that "we end up with a set of high-minded declarations and vague re-assurances that appear largely irrelevant to the concerns of the average voter".