This, then, is Middle Eastern London, part of an influx of wealth that has transformed the West End and cities right across Britain. It is all generated by the Middle East’s energy exports, which have created the fortunes of Gulf State sovereign wealth funds and the private wealth of ruling dynasties whose family offices expand their property empires. Yet it might not last forever. With the US-Iran war persisting unabated, and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, the Gulf’s black gold is no longer such a safe bet. And, as my walk round Mayfair hints, a red line on an accountant’s laptop in Doha can have profound consequences here at home. That’s true in the cars on the streets and the restaurants and the clubs — but also in the influence that foreign money can buy.

Middle Eastern London has been decades in the making. After the 1973 oil crisis, Gulf money made inroads into London’s property scene, with Saudi Arabian and Lebanese investors buying up the Dorchester Hotel two years later. These days, the scale of Gulf oil money in Britain is truly bewildering. Alrayan, a Sharia-compliant bank, estimates that $112.45 million landed on London real estate between March 2024 and March 2025 alone, a significant increase on the previous year. Spears magazine used data compiled by estate agent Frank Knight to suggest that private Gulf investors last year deposited £245 million into UK commercial real estate.

These estimates aren’t particularly reliable considering how much money is routinely hidden offshore. But they nonetheless hint at the scope of Gulf wealth and also imply a striking resilience. Of course, the rise and rise of private wealth is global. But the fact that Gulf assets are currently battered by war — yet still continue their march from the Middle East — neatly evokes the affluence of oil royalty.

This is clearest in the London property market. Qatari Diar, the country’s eponymous property development business, is behind a string of prestigious London hotels, including the Ritz and Claridge’s. Luxury stores like Harrods, the iconic Shard building, and the Canary Wharf Group that operates London’s Docklands — all these are part of Qatar Diar’s portfolio too. So too are some of the most prestigious residential properties in the city, including the spectacularly redeveloped Chelsea Barracks.

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It’s striking, too, that the footprint of Qatari investment now extends far beyond London. Qatari Diar is behind multi-billion pound urban developments in Glasgow, Manchester and Leeds. When it comes to private individuals, meanwhile, the Guardian discovered that Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family hold more than 4,000 land titles throughout Britain: from luxury mansions and hotels to industrial estates and ordinary terraced houses. Other Gulf monarchies have similarly vast holdings, with the Saudi royal family owning a portfolio of West End properties which dwarfs that relative pauper, the Duke of Westminster.

Not that you need Companies House to understand the Arab impact on London. For that you can just walk the streets of somewhere like Knightsbridge. With Harrods as its commercial center, the area is notorious for its “dark” streets and partly empty blocks, giving the neighborhood a ghostly under-occupied feel. Knightsbridge is part of the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which has the highest concentration of vacant, underused and second homes in the UK. Many of these apartments are used by their Middle Eastern owners for only a few weeks a year, when the weather in the Gulf is at its hottest. These dead streets are not a London asset. On the contrary, they look a bit abandoned.

Or else there are the luxury hotels, shops and art galleries, where displays of wealth and entitlement play out on a daily basis. Especially during the annual summer migration, young men fly their luxury cars to London from Riyadh or Muscat, speeding about in noisy displays of wealth. This too can cause problems: late-night races keep residents up, while eye-watering insurance bills result when crashes inevitably occur. There are also questions of accountability when foreign nationals are involved in accidents; Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Britain.

Not that these screw-ups are really a problem: there just are so many incentives for foreign plutocrats to park their cash in Britain. Last year, Alrayan Bank reported that Gulf investors told them that they like the diversity of UK property, from modern blocks with concierges to period mansions like the Saudi embassy. They also like the favorable terms of purchase and the well-developed infrastructure in banking, accounting and legal services that supports international investment. The UK’s political stability, legal structures and relative financial transparency make it a good place to store their money.

None of this really helps the Treasury, as visitors and foreign investors add little to the UK’s tax take or collective prosperity. And what’s bad for Knightsbridge ear drums can also cause more profound tensions. The Qatari-funded redevelopment of Elephant and Castle resulted in the demolition of social housing, with residents relocated to more distant parts of London and beyond. Gulf money in Britain has other second-order consequences too. Housing shortages keep property prices and rental yields high, benefiting Gulf investors who can’t grow their money as effectively at home. None of this helps hard-up British professionals forced to commute to central London from Zone 5.

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What, though, might change in London and other British cities if the Hormuz crisis continues — and the financial and symbolic power of the Gulf States erodes? What if investments slow, stop, or are withdrawn altogether? In the first place, it’s likely that a drop in Gulf money would shrink displays of conspicuous consumption in places like Knightsbridge. Considering the various downsides, that might not be such a bad thing, allowing these West End neighborhoods to open up to more than property speculation and the super-rich.

In a sense, we don’t have to speculate what this might look like. All wars are different, but when Russia invaded Ukraine, the symbolic, political and financial authority of Russian oligarchs living in London quickly ebbed away. Roman Abramovich, Oleg Derpaska, Igor Sechin and their compatriots left the city — once dubbed “Moscow-on-Thames” — as government sanctions froze their assets and imposed travel bans. Today, their mansions are empty and their yachts motionless. Evgeny Lebedev, Boris Johnson’s friend, media baron and member of the House of Lords, may still live in London’s Regent’s Park. But his celebrity parties are no longer high-profile society events.

Of course, wealthy Middle Eastern investors aren’t the only international plutocrats in cities like London — though, like the Chinese, they are significant contributors in making the city what it is. All the same, might a decline in Middle Eastern clout lead to a rethink of the importance placed on international investment and wealthy foreigners in making these places special? Alongside iconic skyscrapers, Middle Eastern contributions to British cities are often seen as signs of vitality, a way of creating exciting city life, and a pathway to underscoring a certain global panache.

But allowing overseas investors to dump money in Britain also makes life painfully expensive for the rest of us. Nor does it have to be like this. After all, Canada, Denmark and New Zealand are just three of several countries that ban international investors from buying property. The UK, though, lets anyone with money to buy whatever they like. To that extent, the Iran war might be a good moment in which to pause and reconsider the impact of the oil money parked on British streets. In the end, does this wealth embellish people’s everyday lives? Or does it just make spots like Berkeley Square unlivable?

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A previous version of this piece incorrectly named the President of the UAE. We apologise for the error.

Two explanations are offered for this trend. The first has its roots in 2010. Since then, this theory holds, we have seen the end of Education Maintenance Allowance, the doubling of student fees, the growing inaccessibility of the housing market to those without inherited wealth, and, of course, Brexit. The under-50s neither voted for this Tory policy platform nor stand to benefit from it. They are unlikely to reward a party that appears to want to prolong their insecurity; their refusal to drift Right with age, then, is a result of their material conditions.

The second explanation is longer term and comes down to shifting values. Its roots are much deeper, dating back to the battle for Hampstead during the general Election of 1966, when the north London constituency returned a Labour MP for the first time. “In an earlier era, it would have been unthinkable that Labour could win so middle-class a seat,” writes the geo-demographic expert Richard Webber in The Predictive Postcode. In the 50 years since, “there has been a huge growth in the size, confidence, and influence of this particular geo-demographic group. A radical minority, once fabled for its eccentric habits — shopping at Habitat, reading Private Eye, wearing sandals, eating muesli, and supporting human rights — … has now come to dominate large swathes of inner London.”

The academic study of values looks at the underlying motivations and unmet psychological needs which drive individuals across societies. A range of different models exist, but all identify a similar long-term pattern: as economies grow and education levels rise, the values of the population edge towards some variation of “post-materialism”. This term was coined by Ronald Inglehart, founder of the World Values Survey, to describe the tendency to prioritise principles such as self-expression and personal autonomy over financial considerations. The 1966 Hampstead result was an early indicator of post-materialist values taking root in the UK, and since then, they have become far more widespread.

What does this shift mean in practice? Those with post-materialist values often place ethics and inner fulfilment ahead of more obvious economic interests at the ballot box. Their values are expressed through concerns about equality, freedom of speech and the environment; through a dedication to larger-than-self causes and to internationalist or universalist ideas about national borders; and through a tendency to agree with statements along the lines of “ideas are more important than money”.

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The idea here is not simply that everyone who reaches a certain level of resource security will immediately move towards post-materialism. People’s values are rooted in both psychology and life experiences, and they change only slowly, over time. A pensioner raised in an era of poverty and rationing may see politics in terms of protecting and conserving resources, despite now having the material security of home ownership. Conversely, a graduate who has spent their formative years in social circles which emphasise ethics and freedom of expression will usually retain these values, even as they struggle to pay the rent.

Even so, post-materialists now comprise a large part of the electorate — rising, according an IPPR paper from the early 2010s, from 19% of the population in 1973 to 38% in 2012. This has created a headache for all mainstream politicians, but especially for those on the Right. Of course, post-materialists are not all social justice activists, nor are they all explicitly Left-wing; they may not even be that exercised about party politics. But progressive parties do represent a far more natural home for them, and so Right-of-centre movements have to work harder to win their votes.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party appeared to acknowledge this. And while few post-materialists will have had much love for the coalition government, there was a concerted effort in to keep them on board. Mainly this came down to tone, but it was also clear in specific policies, such as support for gay marriage.

The Leave vote in 2016 changed this. The Tories realised they could use the large and highly visible presence of post-materialists as populist leverage. They could aim their guns at liberal elites or “woke” youngsters and build a new voter coalition, containing everyone who felt abandoned or confused by the post-materialist shift. Strategists such as Dominic Cummings reasoned that post-materialists were an electoral minority, and an inefficiently distributed one at that, prone to congregating in cities. There was little to be lost by antagonising them. Indeed, getting a reaction was part of the point.

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This plan had no immediately obvious downsides from a Conservative perspective. And it was easy for them to exploit it thanks to the antics of some on the progressive Left, who were often happy to take the bait. Their success was such that the average post-materialist will have spent the past decade feeling that their values were in decline rather than in ascent.

But this Faustian strategy could not last. To begin with, post-materialist values are becoming increasingly common, and so attacking them will bring diminishing returns in the long term. The harder the attacks, the more ground the Conservatives will ultimately have to row back on. If they have nothing positive to say to post-materialists, then they are building in their own obsolescence.

Moreover, there will have been a significant group of more cautious post-materialists who, up until a few years ago, were willing to vote for a liberal or One Nation iteration of Toryism. The loss of these voters since 2016 appears to have been treated by the Conservatives as collateral damage. But this means they have had to lean even more heavily on Leave voters and other groups who, while culturally at odds with post-materialists on issues such as crime, will have been just as horrified by raucous lockdown breaches followed by a Budget which caused the economy to collapse.

The plot against the post-materialists, then, now seems to be reaching its endgame, and many are doubling down. Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith’s recent call on voters to buy own-brand beans is a perfect illustration: it speaks to the most basic concerns about resource protection and scarcity, and ignores the big picture altogether.

Ultimately, the rise of post-materialism is a gradual, organic process, taking place in most developed countries as societies become more materially comfortable. This is not to say it doesn’t come with challenges. Helen Lewis’s excellent radio series, The New Gurus, illustrated that a society where everyone is in search of meaning rather than money carries perils of its own — and may not always be an especially nice place to live. But this doesn’t mean the rise of post-materialism is an elite plot or an institutional “capture”, as figures on the populist Right such as Matthew Goodwin have interpreted it. Nor is it a mass surrender to “Marxism” or “paganism”, contrary to what some of the speakers at the recent National Conservatism Conference reportedly believe.

Can the Right tempt young and middle-aged voters back into the fold? Policies which improve childcare provisions, fix the housing market, or create economic stability could, hypothetically, make a difference. There are few people so concerned about inner fulfilment as to not care about paying the mortgage. But if you look at the age gap data, what is striking is that the voting divide really kicked in after 2015, when the Tories began to signal at every opportunity that they were not just opposed to liberal and post-material ideas, but, in many cases, that they actively hated them.

From Suella Braverman talking about an “invasion” of migrants to Lee Anderson backing the death penalty, the Tories have used language and taken positions which have damaged their brand far more than the sum of their individual policies ever could. Starting to back policies which advance the interests of younger voters would of course be a start. But if the Tories continue to go to war with the values which many younger voters hold, then this “lost generation” will be the first of many.