The human spirit is incredibly resilient really. Even in the depth of our concern over the Israeli-American war against Iran, the worry about what might come next, we can still find time to feel a warm and comforting sense of schadenfreude over the large number of British women with stapled-on lips who are cowering in their Dubai apartments as the Iranian shells come raining down. The name under which these women collectively labour is ‘influencer’, a term which, like ‘content creator’ is close to meaningless and both could be usefully replaced by ‘shitgibbon’ or ‘unemployable’.
We laugh at their sense of entitlement, their shock that the real world has intruded upon their private Idaho
You do not know these people, any of them, I suspect. They are a part of Britain from which you would rather avert your eyes, like Tower Hamlets, Brighton and Wales. They are almost exclusively women – and suddenly elevated from the Untermensch via a complex procedure involving reality TV shows in which they are required to cop off with hench dim-witted blokes who have made precisely the same journey –up, up, into the rarefied atmosphere of champagne cocktails and hideous invasive plastic surgery. Their online followers, who are still stuck in provincial nail bars and call centres with no qualifications and no future, or doing absolutely nothing, purr over the staged snapshots: Christ, if she can do it, so can we! They are, then, aspirational. And a disproportionate number of them are in Dubai marvelling at the fireworks display put on for them by their luxury hotel until suddenly, unexpectedly, the ceiling caves in.
Why are they in Dubai? Two reasons. For many, to escape paying income tax on the profits of a career whose longevity can be compared to the half-life of those synthetic actinides created by man in the fallout of the first hydrogen bombs. Or, because they are utterly devoid of class and discernment, they have chosen to take a holiday there. And now they are getting bombed. ‘So scary OMG,’ said Sophia Peschisolido, nepo-brat and model daughter of Karren Brady and the Canadian footballer Paul Peschisolido, as a rocket crashed into a building nearby. Thank you for that, Sophia.
Or there’s another nepobrat, Petra Ecclestone, daughter of the ghastly Bernard: ‘We came to Dubai to feel safe! We shall get through this.’ Probably, Petra, but it’s not a certainty. Helly Lisa O’Brien posts on Instagram about her family: ‘We can give our kids calm even when we are shaking inside.’ And the others – Sam Gowland (a bloke!), Luisa Zissman, Arabella Chi, Vicky Pattison. All except Sam with stapled-on lips. I think you don’t get into Dubai unless you have these, plus a certificate guaranteeing that they won’t explode during your time in the UAE, under the scrutiny of that pitiless sun.
Dubai is the right place for these people, whether it is being shelled or otherwise, although quite why the tax-dodgers should expect the British government to help them escape is beyond me. I went there a while back, just as it was getting popular with flush downmarket Brits who had had enough of yer playas. It is the tourist hub of a repulsive slave state presided over by arrogant and not terribly clever Arabs, whose immense wealth was occasioned when they looked in the back garden and found some oil.
They are not the worst of the bunch, though. That would be the expats, tearing around the place in their supercharged sports cars or lying on the beach, cultivating their tumours. Everything about the place agrees with them; the endless featureless sand, the endless blinding sunshine, the bling architecture which resembles a collaboration between Albert Speer and Victoria Beckham. The complete and utter lack of culture, the absence of democracy. They like the servants, too – the drafted immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who have their passports confiscated so they can’t go home. The only people I found in Dubai who had a soupçon of humanity, a vestige of wit, were the Pakistani taxi drivers and the whores from the ’Stans.
And so we laugh at the sense of entitlement of these people, their shock that the real world has intruded upon their private Idaho: just the latest in a long parade of Brits who believe that they should be allowed to go anywhere in the world and be immune to the various iniquities which exist in the Middle East or Africa or the Far East – so long as they can have their steak and chips, all is fine. Like the middle-aged couple from Sussex, Lindsay and Craig Foreman, who thought that a motorbike trip through Iran might be a nice idea for a winter break and are now in a prison in Tehran, demanding action from our government.
The problem is, they are only an extreme example of our country as a whole. That blithe sense of entitlement has most of us in its thrall, assuaged as we have been by 80 years of peace at home and rapidly rising incomes. We have been in a kind of reverie, possessed of the deeply mistaken notion that nothing can touch us and that this gilded status is only right and just, something we deserve. We have forgotten the sacrifice and hardship that secured our freedom 80 years ago and – worse – forgotten too that in order to maintain that freedom, we have to spend a bit of money on defence. Our defence spending in 1962, for example – when in general everybody was a lot poorer – was 7 per cent of the country’s GDP. It was still at 5 per cent by the end of the 1970s. And now?
The defence chiefs may rail, the Americans chide, the government make the usual vague promises, but we are still spending a paltry 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence, preferring to splurge the nation’s income on paying people who believe they are suffering from anxiety, or ferrying kids to school in taxi cabs. Those influencers may appear – and indeed are – absurd, but they are only a heightened reflection of the rest of us.
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