BONO, the rock star, yesterday echoed the controversial call for millions of people to converge on the G8 summit by telling people to head en masse for Scotland.

While Bob Geldof had called for the marchers to drop everything and head for Edinburgh, Bono appeared to encourage them to descend on Gleneagles Hotel itself.
His call came as Tony Blair embarked on a diplomatic drive to gain European support for his G8 agenda for tackling African poverty and global warming.

The U2 singer, who has campaigned for debt relief for the past seven years, said the agreement at the weekend by leaders of the world's most powerful countries to cancel all the debt of up to 38 impoverished countries was a great moment – "one of the greatest moments of my life" – but a massive human presence was still needed to avoid a wider diplomatic fudge.

"Politicians love to sign cheques but they hate cashing them and there will be a lot of rhetoric around this G8," said Bono.

"The reason we have to turn up en masse at this golf course . . . (is) if we don't the debt piece that happened, that will stay, but all the other pieces which are as important or more important, they will fudge. We have to give our politicians permission to spend our money and that is why Live 8 is so important."

A spokesman for the Make Poverty History campaign in Scotland said last night: "We welcome any initiatives taking place that can put the issue of world poverty further up the agenda.

"We are sure people travelling to Scotland to join the campaign will act sensibly by making proper travel and accommodation arrangements and deliver a peaceful protest that will help effect radical change for Africa."

The original call by Geldof for one million people to travel to Edinburgh for the July 6 summit has been criticised by some politicians as irresponsible. Last week, the Rt Rev Martin Shaw, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, said there had been a lot of scaremongering about the march and called for two million to attend.

In the fight against poverty, Britain's presidency of the G8 was put in the spotlight with the weekend's historic agreement to cancel more than £25bn of debt owed by the world's poorest nations, many in sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr Blair today kicks off a whistlestop tour of four countries with talks in Moscow with Vladimir Putin, the president. Later, he will fly to Berlin for dinner with Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor, and tomorrow will meet Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg premier, and Jacques Chirac, the French president.

The meetings will be mainly about G8 matters but it is inevitable the crisis facing the EU will be discussed ahead of what many expect to be a stormy summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday.

Last night as Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, arrived in Luxembourg for a meeting of EU foreign ministers, he upped the war of words with France by insisting anyone who thought Europe's problem was Britain's £3bn annual rebate was "deluded", adding: "The rebate is a symptom of a fundamentally distorted budget system."

Gordon Brown held out hope of a Gleneagles deal on climate change. "Tony Blair expects to be able to say there will be progress on . . . the science and the technology, the co-operation between countries, the engagement of the developing countries."