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 labor is “influencer,” a term which, like “content creator” is close to meaningless and both could be usefully replaced by “shitgibbon” or “unemployable.”

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 centers 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 marveling at the fireworks display put on for them by........

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