DAVOS? WHERE’S AN AVALANCHE WHEN YOU NEED ONE!
THERE is nothing the well-heeled dogooder likes better than parading and polishing his or her shining virtue. And for that, the shrine they just have to visit every year is the Swiss ski resort of Davos, in the third week of January.
That is when the schmoozefest of the World Economic Forum takes place. Its motto is ‘Committed to Improving the State of the World’. Admission costs £22,000. Book me in, Miss Bingo. I’ll need a superior suite with mountain rooms and privileged-partner accreditation.
This is capitalism at its most condescending, senior snowflakes in their Alpine fastness.
From its foundation in 1971, the Davos forum was originally little more than a niche jolly for liver-spotted bankers and out-of-power politicians. They would analyse a few philosophical trends, have a couple of spanking dinners with cigars and schnapps and agree to meet the following year (‘but maybe see you at Bayreuth in the summer, Helmut’).
It is now a grotesque gymkhana for the globalised elite, a week-long knees-up with the company credit card when they can parade their social consciences. The Forum has become for management consultants and multinational bankers what Cannes is for film-makers.
Hollywood’s Stars With A Social Conscience attend. Toppled statesmen are invited — last year George Osborne (in training shoes) and David Cameron mixed with wooden George Clooney and that frighteningly lacquered wife of his.
Bono is a Davos favourite, his pink spectacles raising the tone at the Hawaiithemed booze-up thrown by a Californian software billionaire, Marc Benioff. Later in the week they may attend that BBCsponsored talk on ‘populism’ and the ‘rebellion of the forgotten’ (do they mean all those middle-aged women the Beeb has dropped for being too wrinkled?).
After lunch at the Congress Centre, multi-millionaire chef and businessman Jamie Oliver is giving an ‘Insight’ talk about healthy food for poor people.
Davos is itself, of course, not for the poor. A plate of pasta bolognese in the local bistros can set you back 40 Swiss francs — that’s about £30, or the monthly wage of a Bangladeshi factory worker. Yet these creeps take it upon themselves to identify the concerns of ‘the poor’ and tell them how to behave. Where’s an avalanche when you need one?
Billionaires draw their lips into bows of concern to give lectures about poverty.
Rock stars discuss democracy with dictators. Cocktail parties are held to mark world hunger.
Climate change dominates proceedings these days — blind eyes turned to the private jets that whine into St Moritz’s airport, disgorging passengers into 7Series BMWs that convey these pashas of liberalism the last few miles to their destination.
But the Learjet class long ago realised environmentalism was an essential look. Global-warming bore Al Gore has a carbon footprint the size of a yeti, his house in Nashville using 20 times more electricity than the average U.S. household.
And yet he zooms all over the world to finger-wag about green- house gases. Al is one of the Davos trustees. Good old Al.
Last year actor Leonardo DiCaprio, summoned to receive the ‘prestigious’ Crystal Award, delivered a homily about the generosity of philanthropists like him and repeated that the planet was doomed unless mankind became less extravagant.
DiCaprio has raised his reputation in Hollywood by remoulding himself as an environmentalist, as if his helicoptering, yachting lifestyle belonged to someone else.
In May 2016, he flew by private jet from Cannes to New York to collect an award for his climatechange campaigning. He then had himself flown back to Cannes, a return trip of 8,000 miles that guzzled oodles of those very fossil fuels he believes should be ‘left in the ground where they belong’.
Newspapers occasionally point out such double standards, to no effect. Celebrities don’t embrace this climate-change thing to impress the little people. They do it to play the game.
Principles and political affiliations are worn as baubles. If a star had to follow the mantras he spouts, the worthy messages would soon decline — and how would that help the consultants, charity executives and fundraising professionals whose livings depend on these campaigns?
Do you want to create more poverty, for heaven’s sake? I think not!