Wes Streeting mixes with tech billionaires at Bilderberg summit

UK health secretary Wes Streeting ignored questions from the media as he left the annual Bilderberg meeting at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden on Sunday.

Streeting, who fancies himself as a future prime minister, spent the weekend rubbing shoulders with over 120 politicians, media moguls, and corporate CEOs such as Pfizer’s Albert Bourla and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.

Tech billionaires were well represented at this year’s Bilderberg, including Palantir founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, whose firm’s vast data contract with the NHS is the target of campaigners.

Palantir has controversially just been given the entire US population’s database to process. If knowledge is power, then that’s a lot of power.

Topics on this year’s agenda of closed door talks included sessions on artificial intelligence (AI), which may well have caught Streeting’s attention.

He is an enthusiastic convert to AI in the NHS, pledging to “bring our health service into the digital age” and vowing to “cut unnecessary red tape” around the implementation of new technology.

The conference ended with all the delegates being ferried on a boat to a lavish banquet at a palace owned by Sweden’s fabulously wealthy Wallenberg family.

Onboard the boat “Sjobris” or “Easy breeze” the champagne flowed as Streeting was seen chatting with Ryan Air’s CEO Michael O’ Leary.

Photos from this cruise may not impress Streeting’s constituents of Ilford North, where last year an anti-establishment independent candidate Leanne Mohamad came within 528 votes of taking his seat.

Jeremy Hunt, himself a former UK health secretary, was also onboard but preferred to hang out on the more discreet lower deck with the Bilderberg organisers and John Micklethwaite of Bloomberg.

Former UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt queues up behind Streeting at the Bilderberg conference. (Photo: Hannah Borno for Declassified UK)

Unaccountable

Bilderberg has remodelled itself as the golden ticket on the elite AI conference circuit offering something that no other tech summit can give: three days of locked-away access to heads of state, senior public officials and policymakers.

Despite all these public figures there on government business, no press conference was held after the talks. So I tried to grab a few words with Streeting as he waited for his Volvo to take him to the airport.

I asked him if he was going to divulge who he had met with and what had been discussed, and whether he was going to declare the hospitality he had received from the Bilderberg group itself and by extension the Wallenbergs.

He maintained a stony silence throughout our chat.

The wall of silence met by anyone trying to cover Bilderberg is obviously concerning: the heady mixture of lobbyists, public officials, bank bosses and military leaders means that policies that affect us all are being shaped behind closed doors at a conference funded by and packed with rapacious billionaires.

I reached out for comment from the UK’s department of health for a statement on Streeting’s attendance at the meeting.

The response was: “The Secretary of State will be attending the meeting in Stockholm as a government representative and will engage in discussions across a range of issues.”

This creates an interesting tension in the light of the rather disingenuous statement on the Bilderberg group’s website that delegates attend the talks as private individuals only.

It claims: “Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions”.

Bilderberg elite

Streeting is one of only a handful of Labour MPs who have been invited to Bilderberg in the last decade.

Streeting’s colleague, foreign secretary David Lammy, attended Bilderberg in 2022 before entering government.

Lammy later declared that his trip, costing more than £5,000, had been paid for by Newbridge Advisory, of which the sole director was former MI6 chief Sir John Sawers.

Sawers, who sits on Bilderberg’s steering committee, invited the current head of MI6, Richard Moore, to this year’s summit, which also discussed geo-politics.

As the planet teetered on the brink of world war, Bilderberg members such as NATO chief Mark Rutte and his predecessor Jens Stoltenberg quaffed happily away as they sped towards the Wallenberg castle with Willem-Alexander, the King of the Netherlands.

The conference had kicked off with a dinner attended by the Swedish premier Ulf Kristersson which in effect functioned as a ‘welcome to NATO’ feast for Sweden and Finland, whose president, Alexander Stubb, was present for the entire three day conference.

Kristersson arrived just in time for Thursday night drinks before dinner, around 7.30pm at the Grand Hotel and left after midnight. It was no doubt a night spent chinking glasses as the transatlantic alliance cemented their newest military alliance.

The Grand Hotel had no shortage of hawkish guests — for example, Palantir’s CEO Karp, warned recently: “we are likely to end up in a three-front war with China, Russia, and Iran.” These three nations, he says, are “are working together against us and we have to work together against them.”

There were two senior US military commanders present this year, including the head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo. The Middle East was on the conference agenda, and as luck would have it the attacks on Tehran kicked off midway through the talks.

The police presence outside the hotel gates notably stepped up when news of the Israeli bombardment broke. Karp packed his bags (and yoga mat) into a Mercedes (both Thiel and Karp are notorious for always travelling in German cars) and headed away from the conference on Friday morning – presumably his hawkish hand was needed on the Palantir rudder.

After being spotted arriving on Thursday afternoon, alongside aides and entourage, Admiral Paparo was not seen again at the conference or boat trip leading to speculation that he too had left to deal with the crisis.

Alongside Palantir, another of Thiel’s defence start-ups was represented this year: Brian Schimpf, co-founder & CEO of AI defence company Anduril Industries, which focuses on drones and has recently won contracts from the UK military worth tens of millions of pounds.

Some have said that Bilderberg is where politicians go to get their orders, but the truth may be more subtle than this. For politicians, however successful, to be invited to Bilderberg a new level of power opens up to them.

A transatlantic, supra-national strata of power. A heady powerful space where AI billionaires are the new rulers of the world, working together across governments alongside defence and intelligence chiefs.