Influencers
sold the world a fantasy Dubai – and now it’s gone in a puff of missile smoke
Gaby
Hinsliff
The city
was portrayed as an aspirational place to live, but now those who moved there
are realising the precarity that comes with being an economic migrant
Fri 6 Mar
2026 08.00 GMT
To be
fooled by a mirage, you needn’t be lost in the desert. Sometimes, the illusion
is strongest just when you thought you were safely home, posting from the pool
about your teenage daughter’s spa party and your own glittering life in a city
where “the possibilities are endless”, as they tend to be for billionaires’
daughters living in tax havens. Only then does the fantasy explode in a puff of
intercepted missile smoke, leaving just another woman in her pyjamas telling
Instagram (as Petra Ecclestone did at the weekend) that she moved to Dubai “to
feel safe” and war was never mentioned in the small print.
Who could
have guessed that living a few hundred miles as the drone flies from Tehran
might have risks? Certainly not the anonymous hedge funder who fumed to the
Financial Times that “the trade was not that you were getting exposed to
geopolitics”.
But if
it’s hard to sympathise with the super-rich, as they discover that there are
some things money can’t buy, then they are not the only Britons trapped in the
Gulf. The deal Dubai offered economic migrants – which is what Britons seeking
a better life in the Gulf are, much as some will hate the label – was a kind of
real-life Truman Show: a sunny, shiny, sterilised low-crime haven for anyone
itching to get rich or stay that way, sustained by stiff penalties for anyone
publicly shattering its illusions.
Alongside
the wealth managers, property agents and taut-skinned trophy wives who always
accompany the mega-rich, it attracted its share of Reform-supporting X blue
ticks banging on from their beach clubs about London supposedly going to the
dogs; influencers seeking luxury backdrops for their unboxing videos; crypto
guys, tech bros, and assorted hustlers. But many rungs down the financial
ladder behind them came an army of younger temporary workers to clean their
pools and nanny for their kids and teach them pilates, many of whom have
families back home now worried sick. Gloat if you must that they are now
finding out why other people stay home in the rain, but schadenfreude is a grim
look when fellow human beings are sleeping in their basements as the tyrannical
Iranian regime tries to kill them.
An
estimated 300,000 Britons have been trapped across the Gulf by the war:
everyone from honeymooning couples just changing planes to business travellers,
aid workers getting a few days’ break from war zones and families visiting
relatives. Most were no more expecting war to come to them than we were back
home in Britain, where it will shortly be arriving in the less lethal shape of
rising gas bills and petrol prices, disrupted supply chains, diaspora
communities waiting anxiously for news of loved ones, and all the toxic anger
that rising inflation might unleash against a Labour government just as
economic recovery looked within reach.
This war
is weaponising interconnectedness, or the myriad ways in which distant shocks
around the globe are brought closer to home thanks to the movement of people
and money and goods, and TikToks filmed by someone who feels like a friend
because you watch them every day, chatting as they do their makeup.
Why is
Iran, under fire, provoking the wrath and not the sympathy of the Arab world by
raining drones on Dubai hotels, Saudi oil refineries, Qatari liquid natural gas
facilities? To make its neighbours put pressure on the Americans, obviously,
but also to show Washington that if it’s going down then it’s taking the
neighbourhood with it. Iran’s strategy is to make the wider Gulf look too
dangerous a place to invest, seek winter sun, or rely on for energy supplies:
to sever its links to the outside world. A pariah regime that is itself closed
off and isolated is attacking countries whose prosperity depends on being open,
using their connections to the west for leverage. And Dubai is its nearest,
most clearly westernised target, vulnerable to pressure because it is built on
people transactional enough to move where the money does.
I’m
writing this from France, where my morning newspaper reckons Bali is the new
Dubai for influencers: hot, endlessly Instagrammable, but cheaper and crucially
not next door to Iran. So maybe they will just pack up their camera tripods and
move on, hotly but fruitlessly pursued by the demands of the Liberal Democrat
leader, Ed Davey, for Britons overseas to be made to pay tax in case our
military has to rescue them again. (Let’s just say they might want to Google
“tensions in the South China Sea”.)
But
personally, if there is one thing I want more from Dubai’s content-creating gym
bros and wellness girlies than their money, it’s for them to use that
influence. Now they know how it feels to pack up and run from falling bombs,
I’d like them to interrupt the #sponsored content just long enough to reflect
on lessons learned from this luxury version of a refugee experience. Why not
use those connections to the outside world that Iran seems so keen to destroy,
and talk to their millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube
about the insecurity of the migrant path and how moving abroad for a better
life – as millions do daily in far more life-threatening circumstances – isn’t
as cushy as some pretend?
If you
want to get rich in Dubai or die trying, I’m prepared to accept that that’s
your business. But only if you feel the same about every other economic
migrant: for, like it or not, you’re one of them.
Gaby
Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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