Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A quiet week in Davos should be a warning to the global elite

issue 26 January 2019

Nobody who’s anybody is in Davos this week and, as usual, neither am I. World leaders from Donald Trump to Narendra Modi declined to attend the annual super-elite World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps, while the UK was represented chiefly by Sir David Attenborough and a giant Union-Flag banner across the front of the Belvedere Hotel proclaiming — incongruously, you might think, given IMF warnings about what a no-deal Brexit might do to global growth — ‘Free trade is great’.

My own excuse was that I’m too busy at home rehearsing the role of a wickedly exploitative landlord in a spoof Victorian melodrama called Her Honour for Tenpence. And that’s apposite, because although no one bothers with the actual Davos agenda (a load of blah about ‘Globalisation 4.0’), the meeting has provided another peg for Oxfam, the aid charity turned hard-left provocateur, to steal headlines by publishing a chilling attack on the sins of the global rich.

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