Cameron trumped by Facebook in list of who wields the most power

The Prime Minister scraped into the top flight of Forbes magazine’s third annual ranking of the 70 most powerful people, down from seventh place last year.

The list was topped by US president Barack Obama, with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin ranked second.

The only other Briton on the list is steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, at No 47.

Mr Obama was the first person to head the list when it started in 2009, but lost the top spot last year to Chinese president Hu Jintao, who is third in this year’s list.

German chancellor Angela Merkel came in fourth and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is fifth.

Mr Gates is the first corporate executive on the list, thanks to a malaria vaccine backed by his charitable foundation that recently passed a key clinical trial.

“Gates’s goal is to eliminate infectious disease as a major cause of death in his lifetime. He may succeed,” Forbes said.

In sixth place is Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al- Saud, followed by Pope Benedict XVI, US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Facebook chief executive Mr Zuckerberg.

Among the 14 newcomers on the list are Chinese premier Wen Jiabao (14th), Opec president Rostam Ghasemi (32nd), IMF managing director Christine Lagarde (39th), Apple chief executive Tim Cook (58th), New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (64th) and US House speaker John Boehner (67th).

Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old head of social networking site Facebook, shot up from No 40 in 2010.

“What the CIA failed to do in 60 years, Zuck has done in seven, knowing what 800 million people think, read and listen to,” Forbes wrote.

Two criminals made it onto the list – billionaire drug dealer Joaquin Guzman Loeran (“el Chapo Guzman”), head of the Sinaloa cartel in northern Mexico, and Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar, head of an organised crime syndicate in Mumbai.

The ranking takes into account four factors. Firstly, the number of people a candidate has power over. Secondly, the financial resources each person controls – revenue for a company, gross domestic product or a country or net worth for a billionaire. Next is whether a candidate is influential in more than one sphere. The final factor is how actively they wield power.

“The US remains, indisputably, the most powerful nation in the world, with the largest, most innovative economy and the deadliest military,” Forbes wrote.

Among those who fell off the list were WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, American celebrity Oprah Winfrey and disgraced French politician and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.