George Soros, Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab all pull out of WEF summit at Davos

Davos, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its founder, Klaus Schwab, have become more famous than ever before in the past couple of years - albeit not for the reasons they might have wanted.

As COVID-19 spread and the world battled the pandemic, Mr Schwab and the WEF, not to mention regular delegates such as Bill Gates, became the subject of a suite of outlandish conspiracy tales, most of which came back to the premise that they were hell-bent on world domination.

Leaving aside the lurid detail of these stories, they seem to have missed the most important point of all, far from becoming more powerful than ever before, Davos is failing.

Before we go any further it's worth pointing out that pinning down what Davos "is" is surprisingly tricky.

At its core, it is a four-day-long meeting of businesspeople, politicians, academics, campaigners and, yes, celebrities, up the mountain in a Swiss ski resort.