Given that today’s FT included a special 16 page pull-out section on the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos (in which editor Lionel Barber describes the gathering as “the ultimate schmoozefest”), you might have expected the rest of the paper to fall in behind the editorial line. But, in turns out, there are guerrilla-minded insurgents in the Lex Column:
More than 2,500 people are scheduled to attend Davos: including 1,370 business executives, 250 government officials, 250 media representatives, 180 academics, 450 others and one Bono. You’d be hard-pressed to fit all of them in a ballroom, let alone get them organised to save the world economy. Proper cabals need small numbers.
The close-mouthed Bilderberg Group seems a more promising model. It rotates annual meetings of about 100 world business, media and government leaders around Europe and the US, and announces them after they are over. Of course, Bilderberg focuses on geopolitics rather than economics, and its secrecy has inspired wild conspiracy theorists. Still, small numbers and informality are the key. Anyone who is anyone at Davos should decamp to St Moritz.
One can’t help but admire the smugness: in a single paragraph, our feisty authors note that while of course Bilderberg meetings are only announced after the fact, they know that this year’s is at St Moritz. Obviously.
Intrigued by this obviously coded message to the foreign policy Illuminati, your correspondents at Global Dashboard have undertaken a trawl of conspiracy sites, and we can tonight reveal that Bilderberg plans to rescue the world are already well underway: they’re planning to assassinate Ron Paul. We also learned that the Royal Institute of International Affairs is “the foreign policy executive arm of the British monarchy“, which raises the interesting question of which research program Prince Philip is secretly in charge of.
