WATCH: ‘4 Days to Save the world’ was a reality show with big ambitions. See a preview of the Star’s investigation into how it came together.
By David Walsh
March 7, 2010 – The people of the world have now watched the 4 Days to Save the world with mixed emotions. It was an ambitious plan to save the world by a single day. But where a great cause is really rooted in deep passion and genuine concern for the world’s poorest communities, the world has turned out to be less than ideal.
The plan was to start with the poorest countries. They would be invited to join the “poverty alleviation day” and then be empowered to help those less fortunate.
That sounded great on paper. And in fact, it would have been ideal. But the reality of the project was that a major part of the planning and execution had been based on misjudgment. The plan was so ambitious in its time-frame and scope, that by the final stages, there would have been some people wondering what they were doing, who had just signed off on the world’s biggest project – and where exactly it was going to begin.
It all comes back to David Cameron. As with many politicians, he was a keen admirer of the concept of ‘the new politics’. He saw in the ‘4 Days to Save the world’ a grand opportunity to reshape the world’s politics, the way world leaders are selected and selected for high office.
The project, however, was not his idea, but he found himself taking the reigns, making what was initially an ambitious idea into an ambitious project, and becoming a part of it. He was a leader. And to all appearances, the ‘4 Days to Save the world’ campaign was about him.
The way he turned a plan into a reality is the story of a man with a big heart, who was a great ally of activists and, in the process, became the person many activists said they had most in common with.
Many of the activists in that campaign had never experienced the kind of power Cameron would bring to any cause. He had the power to set in motion events
