The bombs and the bombshell: At home in Dubai with Isabel Oakeshott

“Oh my God”, says Oakeshott as a fireball engulfs the structure. “They’d better still honour my dinner reservation.”

I reach for my phone. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Ringing our photographer to make sure she’s safe.” “Why?” 

It is 10am in Dubai, and the air temperature is already somewhere between sauna and gridlocked August bank holiday traffic. Residents are advised to shelter indoors. Airspace is closed. Geopolitical tension that makes super green smoothies tremble has arrived.

A highly erratic theocratic regime explains why we may be witnessing the first stages of the third world war. Iran is unstable, too. But Oakeshott stays on-message.

“I left London because it is a war zone,” she tells me, as a Patriot interceptor missile blasts another rocket overhead. Her face, rigidly expressionless after years of claiming to love Richard Tice, is briefly framed by the fireball and looks like the rage emoji.   

London, in this telling, has sunk into a condition somewhere between post-Roman Britain and Mad Max: Fury Road. Crime stalks the pavements. Public order trembles. Tax authorities lurk with new and imaginative ideas. 

It is difficult to know which audience Oakeshott holds in more disdain: the Londoners who live in the imagined state of anarchy she needs to invoke to have this existential conversation, or the people of Boston and Skegness, a place she and its MP, Tice, deem so impressive that neither of them lives there.

Tice was elected to represent the constituency on a wave of anti-elite and anti-immigrant sentiment. One wonders, then, what these constituents might think about his inamorata’s decision to become an immigrant in the land of privilege and Sharia. Although, in electing an agent of climate denial to represent one of Britain’s most low-lying constituencies, perhaps it is an electorate that has not been thinking too hard. 

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With a Wi-Fi connection strong enough to follow British politics without having to endure its proximity, Oakeshott hovers like a curious kestrel above Westminster’s chaos. Spotting grievances at distance, she pounces on them like voles, and once her talons are sunk, can regurgitate partly digested populist sentiment almost at will.

Today, she occupies the grim perineum between journalism and politics. Born in 1974, she was educated first at Gordonstoun, where she was given a grounding in confidence and disdain for minor inconvenience, then the University of Bristol.

Oakeshott became political editor of the Sunday Times in 2010. Her early career was defined by scoops. From uncorroborated allegations in Call Me Dave that David Cameron put his penis inside a pig’s mouth, to convincing Vicky Pryce to implicate her estranged husband Chris Huhne in a driving points scam which led to both of them being imprisoned, to leaking more than 100,000 of Matt Hancock’s private pandemic-era WhatsApp messages in 2023, her Smoke Alarm nickname is well-earned: she is known for burning her sources.

I am crouching behind a large filing cabinet marked ‘leverage’.

“This is nothing. I trained as a reporter in Glasgow,” she tells me, as a piece of shrapnel embeds itself in her Nutribullet, splattering the personal trainer. “Samir, I need you to go home and change your shirt. And I’ve been exiled because I’ve dared to wield power too effectively. Take the stairs, it’s dangerous to use the lift in an air raid. I’m like Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

“Yes”, I say, unsure of the parallels between the most eligible woman in medieval Europe and the sort of self-imposed disappearance that comes with rooftop cocktails, pristine beaches, and zero personal income tax. 

“Eleanor and I were on enforced retreats. But it is in such interludes that an exiled queen can reflect, regroup, and tweet about how London has fallen.”

I try to keep up. “Er, in this instance, then, is Sadiq Khan Henry II?” 

“Sadiq Khan is Saladin,” snaps Oakeshott. I am keen not to allow her extravagant metaphors to overshadow the ones I’ve already got lined up, so it’s a relief when her phone rings.

“No. Yes. I told you. How much? Samir had a stain on his shirt. Yes. I’ll sack him when he gets back. It’s the only way they learn.” She hangs up. “Richard”, she explains.

“Was he ringing to ask if you’re OK?” I ask. 

“No. He was ringing to tell me the Dow Jones has fallen 740 points.”

News breaks that Ayatollah Khomeini is dead. “Good. With regime change, the protestors will not have died in vain,” says Oakeshott, whose default position is always directly-to-the-right-of-the-worst-person-you-can-think-of.

“Can regimes get bombed into changing themselves?” I ask, doing my best Louis Theroux. “World war two,” she states, flatly. 

“I’m not sure we installed Oswald Mosley in 1940, did we?” This seems to irritate her. She tells me we are going for a walk around the marina.

On the face of things, I am told, we are perambulating among yachts whose pearly hulls glint like the bones of migrant workers who died in appalling conditions, to demonstrate British grit. But I soon understand that the true purpose is to instil in me the attentive silence needed for her imperious pronouncements. 

After 15 minutes, I am struggling to establish which is more relentless. The midday sun, or Isabel Oakeshott’s grievances. 

I decide to flout Islamic cultural stereotypes, and walk ten paces behind her, where I become distracted by the imported palms that bow deferentially to pedestrians whose loose-fitting clothes betray anxiety. Whether it’s the ballistic missiles overhead or the knowledge that their seven-figure salaries will never compensate them for not knowing how to communicate with their own children, it strikes me that capitalism’s end state may not be worth the long positions it’s written on. 

And yet Dubai, with its petrodollars, its lack of taxes, its illiberal laws and its deeply unhappy residents, is the vision Oakeshott and Tice have for Britain. 

Her thin voice continues to recite resentments by rote. “. . . public sector inefficiency, immigrants kicking pensioners off hip replacement lists, teachers having fatwahs issued on them by trans people . . . yes Dubai is vulnerable to ballistic missiles. But its private schools remain reassuringly untouched by the British Treasury.”

If exile teaches anything—from Eleanor of Aquitaine to Benazir Bhutto—it is that the distance between persecution and lifestyle choice is measured in tax codes. And when the bombs finally fall, she’ll be there waiting, impeccably indifferent: the Lioness in Nuclear Winter.

More satire from Henry Morris at mrhenrymorris.substack.com