John Gapper assesses two books that reveal the sometimes less-than-glittering reality of life with the global elite FT Books Essay Read next David Miles Andy Haldane is wrong: there is no crisis in economics Delegates have lunch during the World Economic Forum in Davos

6 hours ago. by: John Gapper

In The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 satire of the aspirations of a City of London clerk, the pompous narrator Charles Pooter gets a delightful surprise one morning. “Perfectly astounded at receiving an invitation for Carrie and myself from the Lord and Lady Mayoress to the Mansion House, to ‘meet the Representatives of Trade and Commerce.’ My heart beat like that of a schoolboy,” he records. Inevitably, the event is bathetic. Exultant at being among the chosen few, Pooter is outraged to find his local ironmonger there. Next week, 3,000 business leaders, politicians and others will gather in Switzerland at the global merchants’ ball: the World Economic Forum in Davos. They are somebodies, not nobodies, although some are more somebodies than others. The invitees wear badges in different colours to identify their status, with today’s ironmongers, the working press, marked out in lowly orange. Many will crave a glass of champagne at the Belvedere Hotel, and to rub shoulders with famous names — perhaps a world leader or the boss of a bank. They may also crave the reassurance that comes with such familiar rituals, for the past year has been tough on the liberal global elite: purveyors of the Washington consensus and believers that the world is flat. The UK’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as US president were slaps in the face. They can leave all of that behind for a few days. “I crossed paths with Bill Gates, who gave me a friendly nod; IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who said hello; and private equity billionaire Steve Schwarzman, with whom I exchanged pleasantries. At the coat check, where I replaced my messy boots with elegant dress shoes, I ran into Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary,” writes Sandra Navidi of her annual pilgrimage in Superhubs. Another time, she goes to a chalet party thrown by Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminium tycoon, along with “all the elite WEF attendees”, where she discovers “endless streams of the finest champagne, vodka, and Russian caviar amidst dancing Cossacks and beautiful Russian models.” I also attended the Deripaska party one year, although I was not on the elite invitation list. Reader, I gatecrashed it. Incidentally, one guest told me he had asked one of those Russian models what she was doing there, chatting to billionaires late at night. “I am translator,” she replied. Looking around Davos, and the lines of visitors plying among panels and speeches in shuttle buses and snow-chained Audis always provokes a question: who are these people? Are they powerful, or aspiring to be? Like any club, the members have an incentive to convince others that it is an exclusive, enticing place to be. But are they potentates or pretenders? Some of each is the fairest answer. Prime ministers do indeed shuttle in by helicopter to mingle briefly and deliver their messages. But the place is filled with the global economy’s equivalent of tradespeople at the Lord Mayor’s ball. Here are economists, bankers, brokers, lawyers, consultants, translators and advisers — Pooters aplenty. The throng is partly the result of mathematics: since the world’s population is 7.3bn, there are 73m in the “one per cent”. It also reflects how the global economy operates: lower trade barriers lead to deals being done in unfamiliar places and many chances for fixers. Networking and self-promotion become crucial talents. Both Navidi’s book and Daniel Levin’s Nothing but a Circus offer titbits about this world at the moment when it could be in retreat. Both, suitably enough, are by lawyers. Navidi is a Davos regular who used to work with Nouriel Roubini, the bearish economist who made his name in the 2008 financial crisis. She practised in Germany before moving to New York to found BeyondGlobal, a consultancy giving “macroeconomic analysis and strategic positioning advice”. Few are better than Navidi at strategically positioning themselves close to what she calls “superhubs” — powerful individuals, mostly male, with a “high degree of emotional intelligence, charisma, and charm”, who “cultivate their extraordinary connections for tremendous actionable advantages”. One evening in Davos, positioned in a knot of people around Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, she teased him about his tremendous actionable advantage in controlling energy supplies to Germany. “Looking into his bare blue eyes, I sensed that we did not necessarily share the same sense of humor . . . with that, do svidaniya, I hightailed my way out of there.” Navidi alternates between celebrating figures such as “billionaire hedge fund honcho George Soros” in their “rarefied world of power, luxury and privilege” and suggesting that it is all a bit unfair. As she notes, “[Soros’s] connections, especially in the political realm, provided him with information that was not generally known” before he made a fortune by shorting sterling in 1992. In the end, she is appealingly ingenuous about a high society in which the powerful come to Soros’s third wedding to “celebrate this joyous occasion — and to reinforce existing social bonds”. Invited to a Long Island reception held by the journalist and heiress Lally Weymouth, she observes that “outsiders are accepted as long as they bring something interesting, entertaining, or useful to the table” and worries about “what dress to wear, what kind of present to bring, and what to expect”. From left: Robert and Helga Salzl; Prof Roland Berger, of Roland Berger Strategy Consultants; and BeyondGlobal’s Sandra Navidi at the Burda-Party in Davos © Getty Daniel Levin is also a lawyer and part of the superhub world, although he has operated more on its periphery as (according to his book’s advance publicity) a board member of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance and practitioner of “the ancient healing art of Jin Shin Jyutsu”. This is rather a vague biography and Nothing but a Circus does not offer many more details about who he is and what he does. Levin is equally imprecise about the other characters. He changes the names of the brokers and fixers he encounters as he tries, among other things, to interest the rich in investing in “education and capacity building” in Africa. Giving them pseudonyms is probably prudent since, implausibly, he recounts word-for-word entire conversations he had with “a few great people and with many people claiming to be great” in his two decades of travelling. The result is entertaining but the reader can only surmise how much is non-fiction. Did a Washington official who invited him to discuss China, for example, really mistake the acronym of the People’s Liberation Army for that of the Palestine Liberation Organisation? It is a neat story that, like other anecdotes, makes him look clever and others stupid, but is it true? Perhaps this is the wrong attitude. Plenty of it is presumably true in the broad sense and his cynicism about others was no doubt forged by the universe in which he has existed, full of “back-stabbers and tools, self-aggrandizers and fabricators”. He still has a sense of humour, albeit jaded. His story has more bite than Navidi’s and he does not shy away from calling a bribe a bribe. Another Washington official casually confesses that the State Department redirects some corporations that offer to donate to capacity-building in developing countries — and thus cultivating new markets — to the family foundations of political backers. “It’s about corruption, US-style,” Levin retorts indignantly. Corruption and realpolitik are difficult to avoid in greasing the wheels of globalisation, as one Russian politician tells him: everyone is fighting “for power. Raw power, in its ugly glory.” The man, who professes to be an opponent of Putin, is later revealed as a backer — a pawn in a game of chess that, another Russian explains, you must “plan twenty moves in advance.” Meanwhile, Levin is enlisted by a state-owned Chinese company that wants to supply telecoms to an African country. The corporation’s chairman is both Machiavellian — he has espionage on the private weaknesses and vanities of African leaders in order to blackmail them — and naive. The deal falls apart when he makes a grand visit to the country on the wrong day. Looking at the visitors plying among panels and speeches always provokes a question: who are these people? Are they powerful, or pretending to be? “The constant exposure to bad behaviour was taking a toll. Commitments were being broken practically as they were uttered, friendships discarded for no reason other than the absence of immediate usefulness,” Levin reflects toward the end of his account of global fixing. It turns out that strategically positioning yourself around superhubs, while profitable, can pall. Still, it has compensations. Levin and Navidi perform their networking in the comfiest places: “Vitaly invited me for dinner at Petrovich, my favourite restaurant in Moscow”; “The Four Seasons bar is quite the scene”; “I always enjoyed the gatherings at his lovely home full of beautiful African artefacts”; “With George Soros and his team, I took a private plane from Teterboro airport”. As Navidi concludes of events such as Davos and the Bilderberg annual conference, members of this tribe “ritualistically attend these ‘ceremonies’ to see and be seen, affirm their status and receive acknowledgment”. Even if the reality does not match the anticipation, it is a warm feeling. “Sheikh Mohammed doesn’t just want you, he wants you badly. If things pan out, you could become his principal adviser, the man he trusts,” one Washington contact tells Levin. The author’s subsequent sortie to Dubai turns out to be as much a disappointment as Pooter’s night at the ball, but who could resist such an invitation? Nothing but a Circus: Misadventures Among the Powerful, by Daniel Levin, Allen Lane RRP£16.99, 208 pages Superhubs: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule our World, by Sandra Navidi, Nicholas Brealey RRP£20/$29.95, 320 pages