(Bloomberg) — Boris Johnson will not attend the World Economic Forum in Davos next year, nor will any of his ministers, a U.K. official said.
The prime minister won an 80-seat majority in last week’s election by promising to deliver on the priorities of ordinary British people, principally getting Britain out of the European Union Jan. 31.
He is now branding his administration as “the people’s government,” an image that might be undermined by the sight of him or his team brushing shoulders with the global elite at a Swiss ski resort.
Johnson hasn’t always been against attending the summit. As London Mayor he went at least twice, to urge attendees to invest in the U.K. capital.
“You just have to chuck a snowball into a cocktail party at Davos and you’d hit someone with a sovereign wealth fund who would fund a piece of infrastructure,” he told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper in 2013. He told the BBC the same year that Davos is “a great big constellation of egos involved in massive mutual orgies of adulation.”
While he was feted when he attended as mayor, it’s possible that in his new guise as someone who’s been accused of putting up trade barriers as a result of Brexit, he might be less welcome at the summit.
It’s even possible some attendees might remember Johnson’s 2014 assurance to the Wall Street Journal, while attending Davos, that the chances of Britain leaving the EU were “vanishingly unlikely.”
(Updates with Johnson’s past attendances from fourth paragraph)
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at [email protected], Thomas Penny, Stuart Biggs
For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.