Dubai

Wednesday

Jonathan Aitken

The UAE and Oman could be the big winners from the Iran war

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. The key question which would surely now be asked by the ghosts of my former Middle East interlocutors –

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: We interfere in the Middle East at our peril

The West’s track record Sir: I read with much sadness Matthew Parris’s reservations about western attempts at regime change in Iran (‘Is this Starmer’s finest hour?’, 7 March). Sadness because he is quite correct, given the West’s track record in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. He rightly alludes to Benjamin Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ plans amid destabilised, chaotic neighbours. In Syria in late 2010, I spoke with resident Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Christian and even Jewish residents from Homs and Hama to As-Suweida and Aleppo: well over 90 per cent pointed to their freedom of association and of worship, the women to the secondary and tertiary education they could enjoy, and all

Ian Sansom

Blockchain fantasies: My Bags Are Big, by Tibor Fischer, reviewed

If you long for that far-off time when novels were prepared to be hilariously funny, vulgar, caustic, wildly politically incorrect and highly improbable you are going to love My Bags Are Big. Tibor Fischer has always been happy to write against the pieties of the age, whatever they might be. He has often been compared with Martin Amis, but he’s Amis without the pose. If anything, as he ages, he’s more like a very funny, very British Michel Houellebecq. You get the sense he really means it: he feels it; the rage is for real. His astonishing debut novel Under the Frog (1992) turned postwar Hungary into a carnival of

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Won’t someone please think of Dubai’s influencers?

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

Isabel Oakeshott

I love Dubai. Get over it

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

Monday

Robert Jackman

British pubs are booming… just not in Britain

British pubs are having a moment. Not in Britain: you can blame Keir Starmer’s rise in business rates for that. Instead, they are branching out overseas. Take Wetherspoons, the granddaddy of British boozers, set to open next month in Alicante airport, or BrewDog, which has opened its doors in Dubai and many other international outposts besides.  Perhaps British pub chains will prove to be our next big export market. No doubt there will be the obvious jokes about arch-Brexiteer Tim Martin opening pubs in Europe. But would you really bet against him? Whatever you think of Wetherspoons, I can assure you that you’ll never find an empty one. Just imagine

Thursday

Charles Moore

Should I wear a burka in the House of Lords?

On Advent Sunday, our grandson Christian became a Christian. He was baptised, sleeping, in the font of our parish church. On the whiteboard in the maternity ward, the newborn’s name beneath his was Mohamed. As is usual (and, in my view, preferable) nowadays, he was christened in the middle of the communion rather than separately. As is less usual, the rite was that of the Book of Common Prayer, ‘The Ministration of Publick Baptism of Infants’. It is tougher than the modern version. The godparents, in the name of the child, had to ‘renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all

Tuesday

Lynn Barber

Was Cat Stevens the inspiration for Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’?

Essentially this is a book of two halves –before and after Cat’s conversion to Islam in 1977 – and the first half is immeasurably the more engaging. He was born Steven Georgiou in 1948, the youngest of three children, to a Greek-Cypriot father and a Swedish mother, with a much older brother and sister. His parents ran a café, Moulin Rouge, on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London’s West End, and the family lived above it. He went to a Catholic primary school near Drury Lane and then, having failed the 11 plus exam, to a secondary modern in the City. But he left school at 16 with only

Tuesday

Jason Burke

Stray shells and suicide bombers in Kabul’s finest hotel

No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward with white-hot fire’ to avoid missiles. Once safely on the ground, she decides to make her way to Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, drawn by ‘better telephone and telex links, food worth eating and a certain faded splendour’. Doucet, a deservedly respected journalist who is now the BBC’s chief international correspondent, made that first trip in the

Thursday

Hugh Thomson

What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition

We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru ever again. How could the British be so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it? But there is a wider, and fascinating, history which has itself been partitioned off and ignored. We forget that more than a quarter of the world’s population was ruled by the Viceroy from

Thursday

Will Moore

Chambers of horrors, the ‘Dubai-ification’ of London & the enduring obsession with Diana

37 min listen

This week: the left-wing radicalism of Garden Court Garden Court Chambers has a ‘reassuringly traditional’ facade befitting the historic Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the heart of London’s legal district. Yet, writes Ross Clark in the cover article this week, ‘the facade is just that. For behind the pedimented Georgian windows there operates the most radically effective cell of left-wing activists in Britain’. Ross argues that cases taken on by Garden Court lawyers raise questions of impartiality. Is this just another example of ‘law’s expanding empire’ over the domain of elected politicians, as former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has warned? The Spectator’s editor, and former Justice Secretary, Michael Gove joined the

Angus Colwell

The creeping Dubai-ification of London

In December 2023, a TikTok influencer called Maria Vehera opened a packet of ‘Dubai chocolate’ in her car and filmed herself eating it. Since then, 124.6 million people have watched her swallowing this pistachio-based gloop. Oh Maria, what have you done? A butterfly flaps its wings – or an influencer eats some chocolate – and soon people are setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to queue outside Lidl for the ‘drop’ of LIDL’S OWN DUBAI CHOCOLATE. Guess what? M&S made one too (£8.50). Morrisons then had the bright idea of creating a pistachio cream Easter egg. Waitrose’s Dubai chocolate was so popular it had to ration it to two bars

Thursday

Louise Perry

Where the young rich flee to

If Elon Musk gets his way, and Mars becomes our newest New World, I had always assumed that the people who emigrated there would be rather like the Pilgrim Fathers – ascetic, homogenous, insular and highly religious. The sort of group that has historically had the psychosocial qualities necessary for withstanding a long voyage to a dangerous frontier. My money is still on the Pilgrim-types to lead the way, at least in the early waves. But I did wonder, while sitting in its airport last week, if interplanetary human civilisation might one day end up looking something like Dubai. Dubai operates rather like a space colony. It depends on desalinated

Friday

Stephen Daisley

The curious cult of Dubai-style chocolate

Dubai-style chocolate, viral star of TikTok and Instagram, is so popular that Waitrose is limiting sales to two bars per customer. The upmarket supermarket chain has taken the move, the Times reports, ‘because we want everyone to have the chance to enjoy this delicious chocolate’. Some are sceptical. Steve Dresser, who heads up consultancy Grocery Insight, has questioned whether this is a marketing ploy, with Waitrose ‘trying to generate scarcity’. The supermarket says no, assuring the Grocer of the ‘incredible popularity’ of these £10 confectionery bars. It’s incredible all right. Even Waitrose’s yellow sticker fare is beyond my budget, so to me a tenner for a slab of chocolate sounds

Friday

Adam Hay-Nicholls

My night with Beyoncé at Dubai's most lavish hotel

Last weekend, Beyoncé was paid $24 million (£19.5 million) to perform for 1,500 invited guests in Dubai. Somehow, I was among them. Her set, which was her first live performance in four years, was 85 minutes long. That’s £230,000 a minute or £13,000 per head. And those millions are the mere tip of the air-conditioned iceberg. Queen B’s record-smashing fee barely surpassed my own champagne and beluga caviar bill that evening – covered by the host. This was all in aid of the opening of a hotel – Atlantis The Royal – which cites itself as ‘the most ultra-luxury resort in the world’. Never has a ribbon-cutting ceremony been so

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Bad influence: Instagramming from Dubai isn’t ‘work’

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans