This week, the skiers move out of Davos, leaving the top hotels to the rich and famous invited to the annual bash organised by the World Economic Forum (WEF).
Davos is synonymous with globalisation and has security to keep out those who believe that the setting 1Â 500m up in the Swiss Alps is perfect for the conclave of Dr Evils intent on dominating the world.
It’s an easy place to defend. There’s one road and one stunningly beautiful narrow-gauge railway that snakes up the steep slope from Klosters. The seriously rich take a chauffeur-driven limo from Zurich airport three hours away; those with so much money they couldn’t possible count it, arrive by helicopter.
It’s quite a guest list. If they choose, the global great and good can start the day at a breakfast on the fight against HIV/Aids hosted by Bill and Melinda Gates, move on to a mid-morning address from the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and take in a round-table talk on the next steps in tackling climate change before hearing the latest scientific research on the brain from Professor Susan Greenfield over lunch.
Fancy hearing what Tony Blair has to say about leadership? That’s your afternoon sorted out. Then there’s just time to go to the Goldman Sachs cocktail party before a working dinner on the Middle East peace process. Davos is the place where the talking never stops.
Some 2 400 people are expected to cram into the resort, with about half of them being corporate representatives of multinationals such as PepsiCo, Morgan Stanley and Reuters paying a minimum of £18 000 to attend and the rest made up of politicians, journalists, academics and a limited number of campaigners.
Davos is an annual phenomenon and it works for three reasons: guests can bring their partners and there are far worse places to spend a week in January than the Alps. And it works because it is exclusive: just as being invited to have an American Express card once had social cachet so being on the WEF guest list means you are someone.
Davos works because the schmoozing has a purpose. Away from the plenary hall where Bono or Sharon Stone might be urging executives to dig deep for Africa, the hideous concrete bunker where the meeting is held has rooms that are off limits to all but a handful of invitees. And it is here, or perhaps in the suite of a nearby five-star hotel, that the deals are done.
The tight security — anybody with the faintest whiff of an anti-globalisation protester can expect to be waylaid at Landquart railway station an hour down the mountain — is one reason that Davos has largely avoided the sort of protests that brought Seattle, Genoa and Prague to a standstill over the last decade.
Another is that the WEF has taken steps — carefully and deliberately –to soften its image. Davos used to be for one side of industry only; trade unionists were not on the guest list, and when they were finally allowed in, the American union leader John Sweeney was met with stony silence as he made the case for the benefits of free-market capitalism to benefit the many and not just the few.
These days, trade unionists are regulars. Blair and Gordon Brown launched Britain’s 2005 G8 campaign for aid, trade and debt relief at Davos where business is encouraged to make globalisation more inclusive. The dress code is informal: men are told to take off their ties and can expect to be fined a modest sum if they don’t. The hope is that capitalism in chinos makes for a more fertile discourse.
Only on Saturday night are the Davos regulars allowed to put on their glad rags and after three days of schmoozing and a couple of deals in the bag the closing soirée is an occasion for a bit of serious wealth flaunting. The permatans, the glitter of diamonds, the mink coats and the face-lifts are evidence that this is a haunt for people with money. And serious money at that. — Â