Dubai’s influencers discover you can’t curate a war

Illustration byDavid Foldvari

‘I’m scared. I’m actually so scared,” the Australian influencer Louise Starkey wailed from her Dubai balcony last week, as what appeared to be an Iranian missile sailed through the sky above her. “It’s not meant to be happening here. Can’t everyone just chill out?”

That final diplomatic proposal aside, Starkey’s words did unintentionally include a genuinely enlightening admission. “Here”, meaning where I live, is the only place of safety that matters for the professionally self-obsessed cohort of influencers who have decamped to the United Arab Emirates for a life of clean streets, low taxation, year-round sunshine and western conveniences. Saying the quiet part not only out loud but with large subtitles, Starkey made clear that missiles were supposed to happen in the other regions of the Middle East, not those with nine branches of Marks & Spencer and a newly announced Harry Potter theme park.

Starkey paid the price for “living life out loud on the internet”, as her bio proclaims, receiving widespread criticism for her staggering insensitivity. “Dubai me a river, hun”, was the general gist in the comments. The video, which featured her wearing a white robe, with full makeup, and a facial expression like Edvard Munch’s The Scream reimagined for the girlies who can’t move their foreheads, was soon deleted. Perhaps Starkey saw sense; perhaps she couldn’t take the trolling. More likely she was gently reminded that “living life out loud” was not always permitted within the T&Cs of Dubai, where anyone who publishes information or visuals “damaging or tainting the reputation, prestige or dignity of the UAE” will be imprisoned for five years and fined up to 500,000 dirhams (about £102,000).

What else could account for the sudden slew of golf course propaganda set to Afrobeat on Instagram since the UAE’s safety was publicly called into question? The trend – it’s been more accurately described as the result of mass marching orders – features a wave of almost identical videos where influencers pose in restaurants, on balconies and walking the streets. “You’re in Dubai, aren’t you scared?” they ask, before responding, “No, because I know who will protect us” over an image of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. It’s rare to see something that makes you feel grateful for the state of politics in Britain, but knowing that if missiles were to strike the UK no one would be contractually obliged to post photos of Keir Starmer as our great protector set to Fred Again is vaguely reassuring.

Dubai’s authoritarian PR machine might be working overtime on the information wars, but it can’t gag the holidaymakers who bolted as soon as they felt their apartment windows rattle from intercepted missiles. Nor can it cover up the surge in the cost of private jets as the rich scramble to get to safety while so much airspace over the Middle East is on lockdown. Still, they are lucky they have a faithful mouthpiece in commentator Isabel Oakeshott, who can always be relied upon as the voice of steadfast reason in troubled times. “HERE is the spirit of Dubai in one act,” she posted on X. “My daughter has a severely disabled teacher who gives her extra lessons at weekends. He’s wheelchair bound. Today we expected him to cancel. Yet he’s taking a special vehicle across town to get to her. That’s how we are.” Again, Oakeshott was unwittingly apt. Because what does sum up the spirit of the UAE more perfectly than a disabled man risking his life to travel across town to fulfil his obligation of giving a British expat child her extra lessons? Oakeshott has been on defensive manoeuvres this week, ridiculing influencers for disparaging the country by cowering in their bathrooms, and defending Dubai as a “haven of security and stability in a troubled region” in an interview on Talk TV. That tagline doesn’t quite fit with the footage of diners fleeing a restaurant as a booming sound fills the air, but luckily for her these genuine reports will soon be impossible to find.

Irrefutable proof of the very real danger of living in the Gulf is a blow for Oakeshott, for whom Labour’s introduction of VAT on private school fees was enough to flee this country, but missiles in the sky are no biggie. Likewise for the footballer Jonjo Shelvey, who has praised the safety of Dubai while lamenting that he didn’t feel safe wearing a watch or having his phone out in London.

Safety for white expats who toe the line is part of the UAE’s gilded promise, but many who moved there are only just discovering it is a shiny empire built on a pile of sand. Naive content creators who appear to have no consideration about the cost of their lifestyle have finally found a world they cannot curate. But, as we all mockingly cry “will nobody think of the influencers?”, it is worth seriously considering how pitiful it is that young people, particularly young women, look to a land of gender oppression as a haven of financial and professional opportunity that they cannot imagine elsewhere.

These people are happy to look away from the censorship and authoritarianism that prop up their freedoms and yet become genuinely frightened when faced with the geographical reality of where they have landed. They cannot believe this could happen there, and to them, and yet they are safe in the knowledge that their native countries will come to their rescue if they are truly imperilled; that when in danger they are suddenly only on a long holiday, not really home. We should feel sorry for these people, some of whom have been brainwashed into truly believing the UK is a lawless failed state and that by pledging obeisance to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi they can have it all. Mostly, we should feel embarrassed for the profession of self-described “strivers” – one that prides itself on deal-making and yet signed the contract without reading the small print.