DON’T PANIC! ELTON’S HERE TO SAVE THE WORLD
ROBERT HARDMAN drops in on the real Presidents Club as it indulges in a different kind of orgy – one of sanctimony and self-congratulation
FOR all President Trump’s swagger about the soaring uS economy yesterday afternoon, I fear the time has come for the rest of us to stockpile the tinned food and bottled water. Cash in your ISAs, sell your shares fast and park your cash under the mattress.
Because the most elitist of all global elites is predicting boom times around the corner. And it is a golden rule that whatever the World Economic Forum says here at its annual festival of delusional self-importance in Davos, it is always gloriously wrong.
The 2018 event has been a vintage week of astronomically expensive partying and preachy virtue- signalling inside the ring of snipers and roadblocks surrounding this elderly Swiss ski resort.
After many days and nights of hobnobbing with a tearful Cate Blanchett, Sir Elton John, Tony Blair, the Kings of Spain and Jordan, rapper Will.i.am and Microsoft gazillionaire Bill Gates, the grandees of Davos have announced that the world economy is about to go from strength to strength. Oh dear.
When this lot forecast sunshine, reach for your umbrella.
For this is the outfit which spent its 2008 conference banging on about climate change and exciting new ‘creative capitalism’ – whereupon the world economy fell off a cliff.
These are the same masters of the universe who told us that the really big issue in 2016 was going to be ‘mastering the fourth industrial revolution’. Brexit? Donald Trump? Don’t be stupid. It’ll never happen.
Most of this lot loathe Donald Trump. He might be a billionaire wedded to capitalism as much as they are, but he is not of their consensual, liberal, globalist, superior ilk. Having scoffed that he would never be elected, they then dismissed him as a populist moron when he arrived in the White House.
Yet the same crowd were like schoolgirls at a Justin Bieber concert when the uS President arrived this week, falling over themselves to grab a snap of the man they purport to despise.
His last-minute addition to the running order wreaked havoc with yesterday’s schedule. A Remoaner-led seminar on ‘ the business of Brexit’ was cancelled because it would overlap with Mr Trump. Who would want to listen to wailing Europhiles while the leader of the free world was on the main stage?
The World Economic Forum is a gathering of 2,000 chief executives, oligarchs, hedge funders, bankers and celebrities plus a smattering of politicians and planeloads of expoliticians, all of them convinced that they know what is best for the rest of us. The big theme this year – without a scintilla of irony – has been ‘a shared future in a fractured world’. This at a gathering with 433 guest speakers whose average net worth is £296 million-a-head.
Local shops and public buildings – even the church – have been stripped out and redesigned as louche corporate hospitality lounges for everyone from Google to the Indian government to accountants KPMG. ‘ Anticipate Tomorrow. Deliver Today’ boasts the sign on the door of the KPMG pavilion. I can’t recall them doing much of either when they were auditing those Carillion accounts.
Davos is the only place on earth where you can overtake a VVIP motorcade on foot. There are so many blacked- out convoys competing for so little roadspace that, for much of the day, the traffic simply grinds to a halt.
This is a town where the authorities refuse to salt the roads (on environmental grounds). This is also a country where it is illegal to leave a car engine running. And yet the whole valley has spent the week in a fug of fumes because a few billionaires and financiers cannot be bothered to walk 300 yards to hear the former uS Vice-President Al Gore deliver yet another lecture on global warming.
Moscow has sponsored the local buses, all of them covered with ads promoting investment in Russia. Perish the thought that anyone might actually use public transport. Status is jealously guarded here.
There was no disguising that jealousy as Mr Trump flew in to Davos this week. It was pure Hollywood as his fleet of monster helicopters swooped in over the lake to hook up with a motorcade of two dozen jet-black off-road people carriers, plus a jet black ambulance.
Everyone else’s motorcade had to move aside for the ‘POTuS’.
Yesterday, he gave them all a lesson in brevity, too. Whereas some speakers come here and drone on for hours (not mentioning any names, Monsieur Macron), Mr Trump packed his ‘America first – but not alone’ message into a quarter of an hour.
I almost – but not quite – felt sorry for the Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, yesterday. Jeremy Corbyn’s neo-Marxist financial spokesman had noisily announced that he was coming to Davos with ‘a warning for the global elite’. Perhaps he thought he would be addressing Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron and the kings of Wall Street.
Instead, he was parked in a small meeting room for a panel discussion alongside a banker, a priest and a press officer with a few hacks by way of an audience.
Davos is actually two events which run in parallel. There is the forum, which modestly declares that it is ‘committed to improving the state of the world’.
Then there is the party circuit, where the real business is done away from the cameras.
So, by day, the crème de la corporate crème sit through earnest seminars on ‘Democracy in a posttruth era’ and ‘Vision 2030’, interspersed with the odd speech from a world leader. This year, there has been much self-satisfied talk of the ‘leadership imperative’, as if the Davos herd have some preordained duty to govern.
By night, it is a very different story. Over champagne and fondue, it is time to gossip and network.
After recent events at The Dorchester in London, this might be described as the genuine Presidents Club – minus the groping. It is also the bit which the organisers do not want in the media.
As one senior executive of a City bank explained to me this week, Davos is a place where two rival billionaires can have a drink together without sparking movement on the stock market. ‘Some of the meetings going on here would be huge news in London, but it’s just no problem in Davos and that’s why we come,’ he said. O
VER his 12-year-old malt whisky, a London-based chairman of a big investment fund admitted: ‘I’ve been coming for years and I’ve never sat through a single speech. What a ghastly thought! I am here because if I wanted to meet most of these people any other time, I’d have to get on a plane.’
The networking is relentless – at receptions, cosy dinners, corporate banquets and after-parties. While Mr Trump was treating the heads of Siemens, HSBC and 13 other mega-corporations to grilled beef tenderloin and green pea purée at the Intercontinental, I poked my head inside the reception given by America’s biggest bank, JP Morgan, in a local museum.
Among those enjoying the miniburgers, champagne and white wine (no red – too messy), were the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, plus Tony Blair, Al Gore, Lord Mandelson and Princess Beatrice (in town as part of the forum’s youth wing).
Theresa May evidently does not enjoy Davos much – and, frankly, who can blame her?
It was illuminating to watch the different welcomes accorded to the various world leaders this week. The Davos gang made it abundantly clear which way their sympathies – and prejudices – lie.
So when France’s Mr Macron came on stage, the audience were ecstatic. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, could have been introducing the Messiah as he thanked Mr Macron for being ‘the symbol we so badly need’ in these ‘fractured’ times. ‘We are waiting for you to guide us in this new world,’ he gushed.
At the end, the former investment banker received a standing ovation from his chums. Mrs May, on the other hand, was received with polite indifference. Mr Schwab gave her a matter-of-fact introduction, noting that she was interested in social reform. At the end, there was no ovation and the applause had stopped before the PM was even off the stage.
And then we had that towering genius, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.
Ms Lagarde is a quintessential Davos specimen. She was the French finance minister championing the euro as it crashed in 2008, and then sailed on to the top job at the International Monetary Fund. On being convicted of ‘negligence’ involving £340million of public funds in December 2016, she was spared a jail sentence and immediately given another fiveyear term by the IMF. The British public may vaguely recall her dark pre-referendum warnings that a Brexit vote would usher in economic disaster, a plague of locusts, ravens fleeing the Tower etc.
This week in Switzerland, the silver-bobbed sage of the Davos class duly delivered her verdict on the world economy: ‘All signs point to a further strengthening both this year and next. This is very welcome news.’
As I say, let’s have an orderly queue for the canned food and water. Oh, and don’t forget a few batteries for your torches, too.