Cop27? Me neither. Barring a last-minute call to join Boris Johnson’s Sharm El Sheikh entourage, I’ll be minding my carbon footprint at home. But I’m sorry not to be reporting firsthand from a more controversial Middle Eastern gathering of the global elite: the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, or ‘Davos in the Desert’.
A ticket to Cop27 is a virtue signal in itself. But attendance at last week’s FII, an annual showcase for progressive sovereign spending within Mohammed bin Salman’s otherwise medieval Saudi state, is a moral conundrum. Just as the UK relies on Qatar for liquefied natural gas supplies while our dignitaries queue to cite the emirate’s human rights record as reason not to go to the World Cup there, so we beg the Saudis to buy gilts and British-made arms but we don’t want to be seen cosying up to the regime that butchered Jamal Khashoggi.
The US – with a starry line-up led by Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, the billionaire investment guru Ray Dalio and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner – seemed to have no trouble burying its scruples in the desert sand; the Chinese delegation, one assumes, had none to bury. As for the UK, our only big name on the platform was the former chancellor George Osborne, bravely reassuring anyone who would listen that ‘Britain’s back on track’.
My man in the canapé catering truck texts to tell me there was a rich moment of comedy when proceedings were interrupted by an unscheduled invitation for the assembled financial titans to dine with MBS himself – prompting an undignified scramble through extra security to bag seats in the motorcade, which duly delivered them all to the wrong palace. Several hot and hungry hours later, their reward was a brief shake of the ruler’s allegedly bloodstained hand. But that’s how the business gets done.
Sane hands?
Donald Trump declaring himself ‘very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands’ tells us all we need to know about the completion of Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of the San Francisco-based social media site from which the former president was ‘permanently suspended’ after the storming of the Capitol in January last year.
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