David Beckham, Donald Trump – what are they doing in Davos?

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:08Coming up on the Sky News Daily with me, Gareth Barlow. You may have heard of the Davos Summit, but what exactly is it? And with Donald Trump joining the party, here's why this year could be more important than ever.

0:23It's that time of year when the richest and most powerful people on the planet descend on the tiny Swiss mountain resort of Davos. They're there for the World Economic Forum. But what is it? Who attends and why does it matter for people like you and I? The summit in the snow understandably has a reputation for elitism. World leaders chinking glasses with the super-rich at an altitude of more than 5 ,000 feet. But as well as business deals, the very future of NATO is skating on very thin ice. Donald Trump's in town, so who will he see? And what will they say? and will any of it stop him from trying to grab Greenland?

0:59Someone else who's in Davos is Sky's very own business correspondent, Paul Kelso, and he joins us now. And Paul, you and I talk about Davos every year. The press talks about Davos every year. World leaders and business leaders do as well. But for those who don't get to get a press pass or don't get an invite to the forum, let's go through the basics. Where are you? What are you doing? And what is the World Economic Forum all about? I am in Davos, a small town at the head of the Landwasser Valley, which is about two and a half hours from Zurich. It's in the heart of what nobody says here publicly is an unbelievably good skiing area.

1:32It's a holiday town. It's beautiful in the spring and summer too. But we are in a convention center that has grown and grown and grown with the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, which is the event we are attending. The World Economic Forum is an organization that was founded essentially to promote liberal economic values. There's a globalised free trading world order that Europe and America has essentially agreed on. And this meeting has grown and grown and grown. It really is a meeting of the global elite. It is the 1%. It might be the 1 % of the 1%. It's a pretty unique mixture of politicians, business leaders, civil society.

2:11It's part conference. There's a big congress hall just away behind me here. It's part trade fair. the town is full of houses and reception areas sponsored by very, very big companies with money to spend to promote themselves by national governments. And you can tell who's got money to spend and who's got a message to sell. But it's also part international political summit. And this year, those three things are intersecting, perhaps in a way with more attention than it's ever had. And the political element this year is bigger than ever. So we've got the 1 % of the 1%. we've got everyone from Donald Trump through to David Beckham.

2:45The question is, why stick it at the end of a ski resort? I've been coming for a few years on and off, and I've never been skiing. And I always think, why aren't more people skiing? They probably are. You might say this place is almost uniquely ill-suited to hosting an event of this scale. More than 3 ,000 official delegates, as many more again who come in the fringes. We are two and a half hours from Zurich, at the end of a valley in a town that is small, often cold or wet, or both. It's eye-wateringly expensive even for Switzerland. But it's been explained to me part of the reason it works is for all those reasons.

3:18Because everybody comes once they are here, notwithstanding the skiing, it's too difficult to leave. It's a captive audience. Someone says to me, if this was in a beach resort that it was easy to get to or in a city centre, after the first morning session, everyone would disappear. But it's a kind of captive audience. There is lots of interesting stuff here that is discussed. There really are agenda-setting, cutting-edge debates about all kinds of stuff going on here. But away from the public stuff, this is speed dating for CEOs and for politicians. I spoke to one CEO just now. He will do three months worth of meetings in one week here in Davos.

3:52He will meet big clients from Africa, from Latin America, without having to travel. And there is a great deal of business that's done behind the scenes for the political leaders and for governments. British government are here with a message still about the UK. They can do the same thing. They can get to lots of people in one go. so it has real value. You don't have to be a conspiracist to be cynical about Davos, but for the people doing business here, it really works. It has been decried. It is criticised. I was reading one quote, a Time magazine editor-at-large, describing Davos as a family reunion for the people who broke the modern world.

4:27It's dripping with elitism, and it's dripping with a lot of the things that many people hate. Absolutely, and a lot of that criticism is well-founded. I talked about the liberal economic model that this place promotes. which essentially is we're going to save the world and get rich trying. And that was open to the charge of hypocrisy even before the global financial crash in 2008. Since then, when the failings of this model have been played out, anyone who's seen their real income in a European nation, and in the United States as well, stagnate after the financial system nearly collapsed and governments had to step in to save it, they can point to this place and say, well, it doesn't work.

5:06It didn't work, and it doesn't work. And yes, it is unashamedly hierarchical. I've taken it off because I'm on camera, but I've got a white badge. A white gets you into the room, the convention center I'm in now. My colleagues who have press badges, they have to book to come in. I can come and go as I please. It says I'm a participant, not a mere hack. Now, I get it free because we're a reputable media organization. I don't know the exact number, but the kind of figure people talk about to buy one of these badges. Tens of thousands of dollars. I've seen$40 ,000 quoted as a price. So it is expensive.

5:39It is very expensive. And that white badge, there are so many doors that slam in your face when you've got that one because there are lounges within lounges within lounges where the higher up the chain you are, the more access you get. It's preposterous in many ways. It's self-regarding and it's flawed. But there are interesting people here. It is genuinely global. You hear interesting ideas expounded, but it really works for that 1 % to do business. We've got to talk about some of the costs of this, because Switzerland is an expensive country at the best of times. And one anecdote from Anne McElvoy, co-host of Politics and Salmon Annes, is she once went to Davos and paid£40 for a soup.

6:24So I'm interested to know, what are you getting? What are you paying for? How nice is your accommodation? When it comes to accommodation, you're on your own. Sky News' business team has done an excellent deal, a multi-year deal, I understand, for an apartment that's quite a long way away, up a couple of very steep hills. And it's very nice, but it's expensive. It's not as wildly expensive as when you come down the hill. So far, I've eaten a frozen pizza and whatever free pastries have been on display here. So we haven't had a chance to get to the restaurants. When you do, what can I say? I am very pleased I am handing over a company credit card and not my own.

7:01Switzerland is expensive. This place goes through the roof. We did have a meal, a hurried meal while doing an edit last year. And I think I spent two weeks family food budget on the meal. But I've doorstepped David Beckham today. You know, I feel like the sky's getting value. This is the opportunity to bring about some remarkable interactions. And, you know, David Beckham's son's posting on Instagram in his stories decrying the family feud, as he sees it allegedly. And no one's really hearing from him. But you're walking through a conference hall and lo and behold, there's David Beckham. David, do you have a message for Brooklyn this morning?

7:42David, do you disappointed family business is being aired in public? I've been asking questions that David Beckham has failed to answer for more than 20 years now. When he was England captain, he wasn't that keen on answering them. But this kind of world is one he has moved in effortlessly since he was a player. Davos needs him way more than he needs Davos. He walks past what you're going to do. You've got to ask him the question of the day. and that's the, professionally, it's a great privilege to be here. You never quite know who's going to come around the corner and you've got to try and make sure you've got a question up your sleeve that works.

8:13And it's easy to ask David about Brooklyn today, also equally predictable that he would politely decline. I recall standing outside the conference all last year and finding myself standing next to Niall Rogers, chic, daft punk, one of the seminal musicians of the age. And I turned to him, so what are you doing? He said, well, I'm not entirely sure, but I do live in Switzerland. I was interviewing the boss of a very big bank half an hour ago, and we had to stop because Matt Damon, an entourage, walked straight through the shot. So you get this odd celebrity element, which I guess essentially makes the place slightly more palatable.

8:45It can be pretty dry. Many chief executives and many finance ministers in one place can get a bit dusty. The conference brings together, I think this year, somewhere around 63 heads of state world leaders, and the big one that's arriving, Donald Trump. And he is already, what, 20 days into this year, set reverberations around the world. The big one this week, Greenland. Who is going to hope to get close to the president? And how legitimate is the possibility of getting concrete outcomes? President Trump, he was always coming. The World Economic Forum have been talking to his team for months. They want him here.

9:22They wanted him here. He was here last year on the day after inauguration, a virtual address in which he put European leaders on, notice that the old ways were done. He set out the tariff threats that he then delivered. He's been the bait that means that another five of the seven G7 leaders are here already. Sir Keir Starmer's the odd one out. The threats to levy tariffs on Greenland's northern European neighbours, including the UK, has upended all expectations. He's turned this into something of a crisis meeting. We've heard from Ursula von der Leyen of the European Union, the president's setting out a pretty clear, pretty robust message.

10:01Europe needs to be independent. The unspoken bit from the United States is much more independent. I think what's really interesting to me is that occasionally we can look at what comes out of the White House and Trump and the method of communication, social media, and think this is all a little bit chaotic. And at the whim of one man, what I see in the build-up to this weekend, we've seen it into today. I was coming up to talk to colleagues in the breakfast programming, wondering what the news line might have been out of Europe. And as I was wondering that, three, four, a fusillade of truth social messages, sharing Macron's messages, calling out the UK over the Chagos Islands, etc., etc.

10:39They are driving a very deliberate agenda here to press America's case, the America First case. They've got a US House here where Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary here, he's been giving press conferences daily talking about everyone needs to bend to America's economic will. We've got Howard Luckin, the Commerce Secretary, is talking about the value of tariffs to spreading peace around the world today. This is all deliberate. It's coordinated and it's following a really clear program to hammer home America's point. This might be the World Economic Forum on the side behind me. They want it to be America's Economic Forum.

11:15So they've got Europe and they've got everybody else on the run, trying to catch up. It's destabilizing and it's wildly effective. Sakeir Starmer, he's the odd one out of the G7. And as we record this, at least he's not scheduled to head to Davos. What does Davos make of that? And considering everything we've just talked about, is it possibly a mistake? I'm not sure what the calculation that was made in Downing Street. He was, as far as I know, never scheduled to come. Rachel Reeves is here. You don't have to go back a couple of years under Conservatives. Chancellor didn't come. Prime Minister didn't come.

11:48They were terrified of the kind of the global elite tag. A couple of things have been put to me. having not scheduled to come, if you come now and you don't get a meeting with Trump, well, you look like you've been frozen out and that's potentially damaging. He, we know, wanted to stress the cost of living this week. That's where the domestic agenda was supposed to be. But the news agenda isn't set in Downey Street. It's set very often by Donald Trump. And that bird has flown. So I've just been talking to someone as part of the British delegation here who said, And frankly, the best way you can affect the cost of living is being here, ensuring that tariffs don't get levied.

12:25So I think the real question is, can Keir Starmer be effective, as I've heard the phrase Trump whisperer, does he need to be here to do it in person? Can he be effective remotely? I'd go back two weeks and say, the G7 are coming. This is a big event. Prime ministers don't look out of place here. Britain's got to make the case for investment, got to bang the drum for why business should be coming here. What's the harm in coming for 24 hours? We do need to acknowledge there is more to life and Davos than Donald Trump. What other strands, topics of conversations, kind of key lines should we look to expect to come out in the next couple of days?

13:03Well, I think ordinarily, if we didn't have this overshadowing political story, I'd have been asking people about AI. The last couple of years, huge amount of talk, as you would imagine here, about where's the real impacts coming? Where are the real gains going to be? Big economic gains, businesses think they can be more productive and make money, but where are the real world gains? And that's Davos' challenge, right? How do you take the lofty stuff here and you take it to the 99 %? It's always interesting to me, the delegations from developing countries, and they see this forum as a way of advancing alternatives to fossil fuels.

13:42You know, climate was a big focus here in the energy transition, and it's still on the agenda, but it has been pushed down by the cost of living, by disruption in the stable political order. So those are the things I think people would like to be talking about. The World Economic Forum, this rather amorphous body that runs this thing, would like to be advancing solutions to those really enormous, intractable issues. there's one very good thing I read on the way up here. The thing you have to remember about Davos, whatever the consensus is that everyone agrees on as they head back down the mountain at the end of the week is wrong.

14:18So I'm going to try and bear that in mind. And I would like listeners to apply it to everything I've said. Let me just grab my pinch of salt to one side and then apply it liberally. My final thought then is, is Davos fit for purpose? Could it be done differently? Could it be done better? I've heard people say if it didn't exist, you'd have to invent it. I'm wondering if today anyone would think to invent it. I mean, this is a product of a man, Klaus Schwab, who built this up by going around and essentially cajoling, pleading with governments to come and join this rather odd little trade fair he was starting up, Upper Mountain, based on a kind of manifesto for how the economy could work better.

15:03He's now stepped back. He's cajoled it into this sort of behemoth, this beast that's kind of slightly out of control because, as we've said, the people who are here want to be here because it's the one opportunity, a unique opportunity to mix with people like them. So it definitely serves a function, but the debate will go on about who that function actually serves, You know, whether any of the good intentions that are carried up this mountain make their way down into populations that the businesses and governments serve is another question. But I don't think Davos is going anywhere. On that final thought, all that's left me to do is say thank you to Paul Kelso.

15:45Thank you to you for listening. If you want more of what's happening in Davos, head over to the Sky News website. We'll be back again, of course, tomorrow.