UK chancellor Rachel Reeves jetted into Davos this week on a major charm offensive. The mission to glad-hand big business and tell them “Britain is open for business” - something UK ministers seem to trot out ad nauseam despite the widely held notion that Brexit has pivoted the country in an entirely different direction.
Reeves was due to meet JP Morgan supremo Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs boss David Solomon and several other corporate heavyweights during her stay in the Swiss Alps.
“We are one of the most exciting places in the world for them to put their money, with a history of innovation, a skilled workforce and a stable government that backs business,” she said in advance of the trip. “The time to invest in Britain is now.”
And after several weeks of bad news stories connected with the UK’s flagging economy, including a run on UK gilts (bonds) related to her shaky budgetary strategy (reminiscent of but not quite as severe as the one that brought down former prime minister Liz Truss), Reeves could point to an improved growth outlook and a PwC survey published on Monday which ranked Britain as the second most investible country after the US.
But the UK media immediately latched on to the fact that she hadn’t been invited to speak at the myriad of debates and panel discussions that front the four-day event in the Swiss Alps.
Several noted that Reeves had been overlooked for a speaking role despite EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the PM of Malaysia and the Iranian vice-president for strategic affairs all being handed prestigious keynote speeches, something that will do little to allay British paranoia that Brexit, almost universally seen as a strategic error, has diminished the country’s standing internationally.
The B-word came up during a Bloomberg interview with Reeves and her business secretary Jonathan Reynolds at Davos yesterday to which an exasperated Reynolds replied, “Will this debate ever end?”
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