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 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.