British expats moved to the Emirates for security, sunshine and low tax. Now, they’re worried about the future. We speak to them about living in fear.
Jon Walker, 44, tells Damian Whitworth
On Saturday night as Iranian missiles were met by defensive fire in the skies above Dubai, Jon Walker and his wife, Tory, were woken by a government text alert.
“It said to shelter in place because there are missiles and drones above us,” says the British wealth manager, who moved to the emirate with his family in 2025. “We said, ‘We are going to have to kind of prepare for the worst here,’ so we cleared out underneath our stairs and turned it into an emergency place away from windows and doors.”
As the sounds of war quietened they decided to go back to bed, but further missiles on Sunday and Monday have left the Walkers deeply uneasy and struggling to explain to their children why their life of sunshine and swimming pools in the desert is now threatened by the furious theocracy just over the horizon.
“It’s a disaster. It’s not the best situation to put my family in, to be honest,” Walker says. “It’s discomforting.”
The Walkers and their three young daughters were fully aware of the local geography when they moved to Dubai, but they were so accustomed to feeling secure that they initially felt unconcerned when the US and Israel started attacking Iran.
“The news was just that Donald Trump had decided to wage war on Iran and no one knew what the consequences were at that stage,” Walker says. “It was strange. We didn’t think too much of it and we went out.” They had family staying and took them sightseeing, the girls riding their scooters below the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.
That changed when they were home at teatime. “You could hear what was a bit like fireworks above your head and at first you are just, ‘What on earth is that?’ Then as the news was unfolding you get the guidance to stay indoors, stay away from windows and then the bangs were in 15 to 20-minute intervals. It was quite frequent.
Dubai apartment hit by drone
“Saturday night was pretty hairy because the kids would hear the bangs and say, ‘What is it?’ We were having to say, ‘It’s just fireworks.’”
Their daughters are aged seven, four and two and they later explained to their eldest what was happening.
“The youngest two are too young really to understand anything. They wouldn’t be able to comprehend it. The oldest is old enough so we have just explained to her that there are two countries not really happy with each other and they sometimes fight and Dubai just happens to be in the middle. It is nothing to do with us. She’s going to go back into school next week and they are all going to be talking about it and she would be thinking, ‘My dad said it was fireworks.’”
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I spent some time with the Walkers last year while reporting from Dubai. Walker, 44, is a wealth manager with Investec, where he was previously head of portfolio management in the UK, running a team that managed £20 billion in assets. Now he advises entrepreneurs who have sold businesses, elite athletes on what to do with their earnings, and former non-doms who want to avoid paying UK inheritance tax. “You’ve got to be here. If I’m not, someone else is going to talk to them about their wealth management,” he explained then.
The tax regime wasn’t his main motivation for moving here but he admitted that not paying income tax was appealing. Over dinner, the Walkers — who are from Liverpool — explained that they were attracted by the sunshine and the lifestyle. Tory had lived in Dubai for part of her childhood and wanted to replicate that life for her girls.
They rent a four-bedroom home in a community with a pool just a couple of miles from the edge of the desert. Like just about everyone I spoke to, Dubai’s reputation as a safe haven with little reported crime was a big plus for them. On Merseyside they lived a few miles from Southport and Jon’s best friend’s children should have been at the Taylor Swift dance class where three young girls were fatally stabbed, but they were not registered in time. “It was just a little bit too close to home,” Walker said. The Walkers were also at the Liverpool FC victory parade but were in a different part of the city from the incident where a car was driven into the crowd.
Now when we speak by phone Jon says the family were really enjoying their new life, but it is not lost on him that their security had been something he had talked about when we met. “It’s ironic that people like me have come to this part of the world and then are immediately in this kind of danger. Obviously this is not what you signed up for.
“It does bring that safety aspect into question and remind you of the proximity of these conflict zones.”
Does that affect his long-term thinking about Dubai? “Not right now. For us it would have to significantly deteriorate from this point to where I felt my family were in danger for us to then reassess our plans.”
Before he moved out some had asked if he was worried about moving to a volatile part of the world. “I wasn’t totally dismissive, but I thought we were past those days of the Gulf War, blah blah blah.”
But he is concerned that the US does not appear to have a clear plan for how this conflict plays out. “My worry is this instability. Who knows what is next? It’s going to change hour by hour so we are just constantly watching the news trying to get information.”
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‘I watched interceptors taking out missiles’
By Jonty Summers, 54
I was about to go to lunch on the Palm. The sun was out and the sky was blue — the kind of winter day in the UAE that makes you forget the rest of the world exists. That was when the first missiles hit.
I remember checking my phone for the restaurant booking as the first WhatsApp message came through: “Did you feel that?” Then a dull boom and my house shook. Then the realisation that my favourite Italian restaurant would have to wait until another time. I’m the regional MD of the PR firm Hanover, and when trouble starts you know there is going to be no time for a lengthy lunch.
The first alerts felt like fake news: “Iran is bombing the UAE.” Why would Iran bomb its second largest trading partner? No one bombs Dubai! Dubai is a city of promise and opportunity. Iranian shelling is not part of the script.
The UAE is really good at handling a crisis. Government communications come quickly: clear, practical, reassuring. The “shelter in place” instructions delivered by text message from the authorities felt reminiscent of Covid — was that really six years ago? The people in the UAE are good in a crisis too: it’s collectively a very supportive society.
For several hours it felt like the drones were simply off-target shots that were intended for the airbase in Abu Dhabi 60 miles south. Then, a jarring moment: a colleague drove past the Fairmont hotel on the Palm Jumeirah, which had taken a missile strike: no screaming, no chaos, just smoke, flames, debris. A collective recalibration was required. I’ve done work at that hotel — to imagine a rocket punching through it felt like a violation of something larger than bricks and glass.
My Sunday morning coffee became a front-row seat to missile defence. I stood looking up watching THAAD interceptors taking out short-range missiles 10,000m high up above Jumeirah beach. Boom and a puff of smoke… like an errant weather balloon. The sky had become theatre.
Emotionally, Dubai’s reaction has been layered. There were the immediate calls to colleagues and friends, where hearing a familiar voice reasserts some kind of normality. There were texts from clients and friends abroad, all more concerned than people here. There was also a stubborn instinct not to overreact. I have felt weirdly calm. This is the Gulf, after all; brinkmanship is part of the regional vocabulary. You tell yourself that the systems are sophisticated, the leadership measured.
Practically, of course, calculations begin. Flights out? Some may have considered it. But you don’t evacuate lightly when your life is embedded somewhere — when you’ve chosen this place, built a business here, raised a family here. The UAE is the oasis of security in an unstable region. That is part of its promise.
Some people are thinking of contingency plans now. But everyone I know is in for the long haul, confident that the UAE will engineer a practical and positive way forward. No matter what the news shows, no one here thinks Dubai is about to break. My company has initiated our safety protocols: remote working activated, alternative venues identified, crisis communications drafted. People are not panic buying. Supermarkets are queueless. And the roads, for once, are a breeze to drive around.
What strikes me most is the composure. Cafés are open. People stroll on the beach. The skyline still glitters at night, defiant and immaculate. Yet conversations dip quickly into geopolitics, into speculation about escalation, about what this means for the UAE’s carefully balanced diplomacy. For a country that has built its brand on safety and certainty, can three days of shelling feel existential?
And still life continues. School is remote. Work is remote. Gyms are busy. Dinner reservations are still made. The dog gets his walk twice a day.
‘The bangs weren’t near enough to rattle our windows’
By Nick Donaldson, 62
Friday night had been fun. We’d been out for dinner with friends and were ambling back to our Abu Dhabi home, a ten-minute stroll from the beaches of the Corniche. After 25 years of living and working in London we moved here eight years ago to experience a different lifestyle after our kids left home. The UAE prides itself on being a safe place to live and we have found that to be true.
Saturday morning brought the news that Israel had bombed Tehran via the Newcastle United Abu Dhabi Supporters WhatsApp group, not usually the most precise of news outlets. This wasn’t exactly a surprise, yet even after President Trump’s rambling speech announced Operation Epic Fury I didn’t take the not-so-subtle hint that a bit of bother might be heading our way.
The first sign of that came from the Plane Finder fans, with messages appearing on WhatsApp groups about the airspace being closed along with those little pictures of moving streams of yellow planes studiously avoiding Iran and the region, including the UAE. Minutes later, reports appeared from people who’d heard loud bangs.
Nick Donaldson and his wife, Cath
We turned on the TV but it lagged behind WhatsApp, where photos were posted of puffs of smoke from intercepted missiles and plumes of it way out in the desert — most accurate, some completely wrong. My building’s chat groups burst into a frenzy; I had seen and heard nothing.
Even when reports filtered on to the TV of more interceptions and explosions in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, it seemed unreal, despite the images of clouds of smoke above places I recognised. Then odd, muffled bangs could be heard, luckily none of them loud enough or near enough to rattle our 13th-floor windows.
My wife, Cath, decided we should do the British thing and go to the shops — one of the biggest malls in central Abu Dhabi is just downstairs. What we need in a time of crisis is bottles of water and loo roll. There were no sign of panic — although more people were glued to their phones than usual. A delivery driver stopped me to show an obvious AI nonsense of missiles hitting a generic Gulf city where the missiles moved slower than the people running.
Only later came the shocking, sobering images of a luxury hotel being hit and the news that someone had been killed by debris.
Both the UAE authorities and the UK embassy were excellent in their advice and warnings — in short: stay under shelter, meaning stay at home, which we have done.
The one thing guaranteed to make you jump: the air raid sirens going off via mobile phones. These scream out of your phone whether you have it on or off and scare the hell out of you, especially if you have just fallen asleep. Which, of course, we had when it went off at about 12.30am. Then again five minutes later.
More frantic chat on our building’s WhatsApp: “I’m taking the kids to sleep in the car in the basement!”; “I’ve set up camp beds away from the windows!” Perfectly understandable, but I took my chances and spent the night in bed rather than in the back of my Kia Rio.
The night passed fitfully but without further incident other than some distant explosions not long after the alarm. It turned out that the airport had been the target and there had been another tragic death, as well as its inevitable closure.
This brings another problem, a personal one. My in-laws have been visiting us for a fortnight, but now they may not be able to head home and will indeed be extending their stay for the foreseeable. Not that they have been any bother, but there are medicines to be repeated and appointments back in Todmorden that need to be attended. Fingers crossed they’ll be able to get home before long, or I may have to move into a hotel with the 20,000 or so tourists unable to take their flights due to airport closures, their bills being picked up by the UAE — a real taste of Arab hospitality.
The rest of the weekend passed without much incident in our neighbourhood, although there were, and continue to be, drone and missile attacks in other areas, mostly intercepted. But not within my earshot so far.
As I look out of the window the streets are relatively quiet, but it’s Ramadan, so that’s not unusual. Hopefully it won’t be long until we will once again feel that this is the safest place in the world.