Dubai

As the Islamist regime in Iran attacks Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain and Kuwait with drones and missiles, some in the west are quietly happy to see the Gulf’s skyscrapers lose their shine. "Dubai has no culture or history," say the armchair critics. When it comes to measures of wealth preservation, attracting millionaires, rule of law, social safety, artificial intelligence adaptation and combating Islamist radicalism, the UAE comes out far ahead of many western countries. But we can’t acknowledge this, so we insinuate our snootiness is about culture, history, risks and future stability. The snobs are wrong.  We insinuate our snootiness towards Dubai is about culture, history, risks and future stability.

Sixty years ago, I first gazed out on the Strait of Hormuz from the Musandam peninsula of Oman. I was there as private secretary to my godfather, Selwyn Lloyd, who had been Britain’s foreign secretary during the Suez Crisis. The previous evening our host, Sultan Said bin Taimur, the ruler of Oman for nearly 40 years, commented gloomily: ‘When two fish are fighting in these waters, the British are behind it.’ I estimate that I must have made at least 250 visits to the Gulf states in the intervening six decades.

I am in Dubai where we are doing our best to keep calm and carry on. Granted, the sudden instruction to "seek immediate shelter' in the early hours of Sunday morning was unnerving, but with the exception of excitable "influencers," few people are cowering in their basements. On Saturday evening, I’d hotfooted it to the Palm Jumeirah. When my kids told me the Fairmont hotel had been hit, I didn’t believe them. The idea that the mad mullahs would start lashing out in this direction seemed completely absurd. Though the Emiratis take a far dimmer view of Islamic extremism than our own craven British government, they are careful not to upset "brotherly" neighbors. The UAE has prospered precisely because of this strategic restraint. Surely some mistake?

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.