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?

***

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

 A cynical interpretation might be that, with President Trump and MAGA in power, various foreign influence operations are in overdrive, trying to recruit homegrown American allies close to power. A less conspiratorial read is that these days, some degree of “globalism” is impossible to avoid for influencers and intellectuals — even hard-core nationalist ones.

 The crisscrossing lines of tension — between the various factions and their beloved foreign lands — became starkly visible this week during the annual Doha Forum. The Qatari state sponsors the annual gabfest to promote “Diplomacy, Dialogue, Diversity.” Tucker Carlson, a leading spokesman for the Israel-critical faction of MAGA, spoke at the forum, and was pictured on the sidelines flipping off the camera while holding a cocktail; in another photo, he was seen standing next to Donald Trump, Jr. (a reminder of the Trump dynasty’s general Qatar-friendliness).

But Carlson didn’t just speak in Qatar. He staked a personal claim in the tiny emirate, telling the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, “I am . . . tomorrow buying a place in Qatar…. I’m doing that because I like the city. I think it’s beautiful.”

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He was joined by Rob Smith, described by Fox News as a “black gay conservative influencer,” who gushed on X about the “INCREDIBLE time to be a FREE AMERICAN and visit the AMAZING Doha, Qatar! Can’t wait to return!”

To each his own, I suppose. I’ve only transited through the Doha airport, and couldn’t get out fast enough, what with the gaudy atmosphere, the tacky design, the dry duty-free shops — all upheld by an army of South Asian and Southeast Asian workers who showed the foreign sahib such extreme obeisance, it made me wonder if they were forced into it or kept in line with corporal punishment (human- and labor-rights groups allege widespread worker abuse, including in the construction of the airport).

Neil Patel, a longtime Carlson collaborator and his co-founder at both The Daily Caller and the Tucker Carlson Network, seemed to trollishly revel in just this impression, taunting opponents with a Doha Forum greeting posted from “​​the booodthirsty [sic], terror-supporting slave state of Qatar,” as he put it.

At his best, Carlson speaks for the Jeffersonian ideal of a modestly propertied, competent, and free republican citizenry. Qatar is very, very far from the vision. So why is he love-bombing the Doha sheikhs? It’s because they represent a counterpole to another foreign state, Israel, which Carlson blames for playing a destructive role in the Middle East and a distortive one in domestic US politics. Lately, the pro-Israel community has been accusing many of the Jewish state’s critics of being on the Qatari payroll. Carlson’s newfound admiration for the slave state — unlike Patel, I mean that unironically — probably has less to do with Qatar as such than poking his factional enemies in the eyes.

Which brings us to Israel, a site of deep libidinal investment for a different populist faction — and not just populists, but also classical liberals, neoconservatives, and hard-core evangelical Zionists, among others — and for a much longer span than the Right has been interested in charming Qatar.

For Americans of a certain vintage (me included), support for Israel has been an extension of our faith in Western democracy, and an expression of our solicitude for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Zionism predates the industrial slaughter of Jews in World War II, but that event added urgency to it. In my case, part of my political maturation involved the conclusion that, for so long as the world is divided into nation-states, the Jews are entitled to one of their own.

Yet lately, Israel’s American reception has dramatically changed. The Jewish state’s popularity is underwater with nearly all demographic groups save for Republicans over the age of 50. This owes to a number of factors. One is fatigue with the Mideast wars and, relatedly, strategic divergence between Jerusalem and Washington (the United States wants to leave the region; Israel keeps goading Washington back in, most recently by explicitly demanding American intervention in its 12-Day War with Iran).

Another is the brutality of Israel’s operations in Gaza — and the growing power of an Israeli hard Right that makes the country hard to swallow for liberal-minded Americans, not least many younger American Jews. 

Amid these troubles, Israel has become a Right-wing-influencer destination (even as others take the opposite journey to Qatar). For hard-line populists drawn to it — figures like Laura Loomer and Tommy Robinson — support for Israel is less about postwar liberal ideals and more about the Jewish state as a smiter of Muslims and a place that is increasingly and unabashedly ethno-nationalist, a transformation they wish more Western democracies would emulate.

The pundit junkets to Israel continue — I’ve taken several under the auspices of mainstream Jewish groups and Christian ones — but they have a different tenor now, and attract a different type of commentator.

Other MAGA trips have similar domestic valences. Hungary is seen as a successful nationalist model that combines an unapologetic cultural conservatism and border restrictionism with Christian-democratic, pro-family welfarism (though many Anglo-American admirers neglect to notice, much less try to reproduce, that last aspect). Russia is, for some, a “based” avatar of Christian civilization (notwithstanding its high rates of alcoholism and low birth rates); others rally to its cause because they oppose NATO interventionism and NATO values (“globo-homo”).

Here’s the thing, though: as an American and a Republican, you can simply favor a more restrained foreign policy without falling in love with any foreign state, whether a fortress-outpost of Jabotinskyism or a decadent, slave-owning sheikhdom. Indeed, the modal attitude among the MAGA base is probably something like: to hell with all of them!

There is an interesting material explanation for America First factions’ investment in exotic lands. To wit, intellectuals and pundits are part of the hyper-mobile professional class, even the ones who outwardly reject transnational mobility. 

We’re hyper-online, have the means to travel, and attend schools, seminars, and shindigs that put us in touch with opinion elites from around the world. Moreover, the human mind, if we are to believe the Greek sages and Saint Paul in Romans, tends to seek universal models and rationalities. Pure MAGA-ism, for the chattering class, is almost impossible. We’ll always have Paris — or beautiful Doha.

It was the first time Israel has struck on Qatari soil, and, more than just shrapnel, its missiles carried two messages. The first is that Israel’s war with Hamas is now global. For decades, Hamas’s political bureau has operated from Qatar, tolerated by the United States, Europe, and indeed Israel, with Doha a useful channel for diplomacy. Hamas could plot, posture, and negotiate in five-star hotels while Israeli bombs flattened Gaza. The fiction was that these men, in their Gulf exile, could be treated differently from those directing the war on the ground.

By attacking Doha, Israel has made clear that this distinction is now a delusion. Yet, if anything, the second message is even more controversial. The men Israel tried to kill were reviewing Washington’s latest ceasefire proposal. By hitting them mid-discussion, it has therefore made the peace process itself a target. Israel has long raged at the diplomatic scaffolding that keeps Hamas at the table; the Doha strike is a challenge not just to Hamas but to the very architecture of mediation that has sustained the brief pauses in the Gaza war.

The strike could be a warning to get on with things, to accept the deal on offer. Let’s not forget that on 7 September, Donald Trump posted a clear warning on Truth Social: “The Israelis have accepted my Terms,” he said. “It is time for Hamas to accept as well. I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”

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But after the strike, Trump’s tone was markedly different. He was, he insisted, “very unhappy about every aspect”. Whether or not he means this genuinely, he certainly needs to say it. Qatar is home to Al Udeid airbase, the largest US military facility in the region, and it’s central to America’s strategy in the Middle East. To allow Israel to bomb Qatar’s capital without clear condemnation is politically dangerous. On the other hand, neither can the White House afford to rupture ties with Israel, which gives Washington a strong foothold in the Middle East, and provides huge benefits in terms of access to military innovation and Israeli intelligence. Because of all this, Washington crouches awkwardly, half-ally, half-broker, trying to placate both sides while still playing mediator with Hamas.

For Hamas itself, the strike obviously is a big problem. As well as enjoying Doha’s hotels, prostitutes and offshore banking facilities, its leaders could also fundraise, spit propaganda, and participate in negotiations without any immediate threat of assassination. That’s over. And if they are not safe in Qatar, where are they safe?

The international response, meanwhile, has been swift and furious. UN Secretary General António Guterres called it a “flagrant breach” of international law, accusing Israel of deliberately undermining a diplomatic process in which Qatar had been playing a constructive role. Turkey went further, branding the attack “state terrorism”. Even Germany declared it “unacceptable”.

As for Qatar, Israel’s attack is almost personal. No wonder it denounced yesterday’s events as a “cowardly violation” of its sovereignty. Its role as mediator rested on a delicate balance: tolerated by the West, trusted by Hamas. Israel has just violated, if not ended, that neutrality. This is the new logic of escalation. The world is now a battleground; diplomacy cannot be used as a cover for impunity.

And if yesterday’s attack cut to the heart of global diplomatic norms, the broader consequences could be severe. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, were already under strain thanks to the bloodbath in Gaza. Arab leaders who signed them must now explain to their people why they stand alongside a state willing to bomb a Gulf capital. That said, as Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, observes, Qatar is not a participant in the Abraham Accords and indeed is an enemy of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in everything but name.

For Spyer, then, the logic here is clear. “Israel is at war with Hamas, because of the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis in 2023,” he says. “Hamas just claimed responsibility for a murderous terror attack in Jerusalem. Qatar domiciles the Hamas leadership and plays a double game — facilitating Hamas activities and then presenting itself as a mediator.” Given all this, Spyer adds, it’s unsurprising that Israel should have attacked Hamas’s Doha leaders once it had the necessary intelligence and military capacity.

Yet ceasefire negotiations, however flawed, were one of the few lifelines in a war that has already killed tens of thousands. By bombing Hamas leaders’ mid-discussion, Israel may hollow out the space for diplomacy. If, after all, mediators can no longer guarantee the safety of participants, then what mediator will host talks? And without talks, the war grinds on, with no end in sight.

Hamas will now seek to turn the dead into martyrs, brandishing them to the world as proof that Israel is the enemy of peace. For its part, Israel did not kill the men it sought. But it has made clear that it is prepared to carry its fight wherever it deems necessary, regardless of diplomatic conventions.

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One of the clearest agents of change over the last decade has been the repeated erasure of political norms. In the West’s domestic politics, Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise of populism have torn up so much of what we once thought was politically immutable. Similar trends are clear internationally too. When the Iranians first struck Israel directly, in April 2024, people scoffed at the lack of damage it did. But I did not: I knew that the norm of direct Iran-Israeli confrontation was shattered. More direct conflict would ensue and so it did. Last night, yet another international norm — you don’t touch the GCC — has vanished too.

Sometimes we move from one era to another in a single event: think of 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Generally, though, we do so more gradually, as the political and ideological scaffolding that held it in place slowly disintegrates. That seems to be happening here, as we move from our “Long Age of Peace” to what increasingly looks like “An Age of War”.

From the Israeli perspective, anyway, the imperative is clear: to move beyond an era defined by relentless terror attacks and perpetual conflict toward something resembling security. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has staked his legacy on a gamble: that overwhelming strength, and the repeated destruction of Israel’s enemies, can achieve what diplomacy with Hamas has not. Much of Western Europe, and the world’s international institutions, continue to insist that negotiations must be given space, that “de-escalation” is the only viable path. Israel, though, looks to its record of its hard-power gambles, from the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah to the extraordinary pagers operation, that have paid dividends both domestically and regionally.

Yesterday was yet one more gamble, perhaps Israel’s most dangerous so far. Now we will have to wait and see: if the international institutions and diplomatic norms of the postwar political settlement remain, or whether we are truly into a new epoch, in which to flourish, and indeed to win, states must now abide by an altogether new set of brutal political norms.

That was the first thing I thought of when I heard that Francis had died this week. Your first World Cup always leaves the deepest impression, and Francis remained my footballing reference point. And yet, to look at the photographs that accompanied his obituaries was to be transported to another world, when kits came in blocks of simple colours, unsullied by corporate logos. But in one key respect, Francis was part of football’s future, not its past. In 1979, when he joined Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City, he became the first British player to be transferred for £1 million.

At the time, that seemed an extraordinary fee and generated a media storm; now the idea that two Midlands clubs could be involved in a deal that provoked moral outrage seems faintly absurd. Footballers don’t bus across county lines anymore; they rarely have to touch the ground. The Francis signing may have made a statement about Clough’s self-confidence and Forest’s ambition. But, vast as Clough’s ego was, all this has the air of prelapsarian parochiality — especially when compared with Saudi Arabia’s imperial football ambitions, which have most recently set their sights on the French forward Kylian Mbappé.

Like Francis, Mbappé is a brilliant footballer. He is 24, powerful, quick, a superb dribbler and a clinical finisher. He is one of only five players to have scored in two World Cup finals, and was the top-scorer in the 2022 finals. But after Al-Hilal reportedly made a bid of €300m to sign him from Paris Saint-Germain this week, he has also become the highest-profile player in Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary investment in sport — having already been a key figure in Qatar’s investment in sport.

PSG signed Mbappé in 2017, initially on loan, with a total €180m payable in 2018 — a manoeuvre that circumvented any Financial Fair Play sanctions in the summer they paid €222m to sign the Brazilian forward Neymar from Barcelona. These prodigal purchases were the two leading acts in the creation of football’s current financial environment. The Neymar fee more than doubled the previous world transfer record — by far the biggest proportional jump in history. It is a fee impossible to justify in financial terms alone. PSG’s owners, Qatar Sports Investment (QSI), wanted to be the club who held the world record. Whether by accident or design, it also served to inflate the market, creating the financial pressures on the traditional elites that were a major driver in the failed Super League project.

The QSI purchase of PSG in 2011 was part of Qatar’s more general spending on sport, which culminated in the staging of the 2022 World Cup. And this is all occurring at the highest levels of Gulf statecraft. It followed on from the acquisition in 2008 of Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour, the current vice-president and deputy prime minister of the UAE. His brother is president of the UAE and his father-in-law is the ruler of Dubai, leaving City — whose most famous patrons were once Noel and Liam Gallagher — effectively owned by the state of Abu Dhabi. (Mansour himself bought the club from the former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, while it’s now clear that when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, the move was authorised, perhaps even instigated, by Vladimir Putin.)

So neither billionaire nor government involvement in football is new — it wasn’t even new when Mussolini transformed the 1934 World Cup into a celebration of fascist Italy. But the investments made in sport by Saudi Arabia over the past two years have taken it to a new level. A Guardian report suggests spending by the Saudi Public Investment Fund in sport totals at least £6bn since the beginning of 2021. Saudi Arabia has staged Formula One grands prix and world championship title fights; it set up a rebel golf tour, is planning a $500m “esports city” and bought Newcastle United. A bid to host the 2030 World Cup appears to have stalled, but earlier this year the PIF bought the four most storied teams in the Saudi league — Al Nassr (which had already signed Cristiano Ronaldo), Al Hilal, Al Ahli and Al Ittihad.

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Whether the PIF is an arm of the Saudi state depends who it is talking to. Richard Masters, the CEO of the Premier League, claimed he had “legally binding assurances” that the PIF, which is chaired by Mohamed bin Salman, the Crown Prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia, is an independent body. In a filing to a US federal court investigating the establishment of the rebel golf tour, though, the PIF was described as “a sovereign instrumentality of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, while a discovery order was dismissed as “an extraordinary infringement on the sovereignty of a foreign state”. Masters told a Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee in March that he was unable to comment on the discrepancy.

Saudi clubs have been busy this summer signing rafts of ageing players — standard practice for a league looking to raise its profile and establish itself. It was the business model of the North American Soccer League in the Seventies, and countries as diverse as Japan, Australia, India and China have followed a similar path. What is different is that Saudi pockets may be deep enough that, having established credibility, they can soon start to entice stars who are at or approaching their peak. Which brings us back to Mbappé. His time at PSG has been, certainly from a purely footballing point of view, a failure. Although PSG are perennial winners of the French league, it means very little when they are so much richer than everybody else. PSG have never won the Champions League. Other than 2020, when they lost in the final to Bayern Munich, they haven’t really got close. In each of the last two seasons, since Lionel Messi joined Neymar and Mbappé to form a vaunted but disjointed forward line, they’ve gone out in the last 16.

Elite modern football is not won by a collection of egocentric superstars, no matter how individually gifted. Coaches who leave PSG speak of a corrosive dressing-room dynamic, of bitter infighting and essentially ungovernable players who object to game plans that require too much running. The best sides are coherent units in which every component not only has a critical function in itself, but in relation to other components within the system. It is not something easy to represent statistically, but a useful guide is how much defending forwards do. Mbappé made a total of 10 tackles and six interceptions in the whole of last season: he has become symptomatic of the way PSG’s stars are indulged to the detriment of the team. There is a sense that, brilliant as Mbappé is, he could be better and that he is stagnating at PSG.

This is not how Francis behaved, nor was allowed to behave. Considering him too soft, Clough treated him with the severity of a public-school master. He would have him make the tea in games in which he wasn’t playing, and would deliberately goad him to try to provoke a reaction. Clough had him make his debut after his record-breaking move for the thirds, playing on a park pitch in front of 40 fans.

Mbappé’s contract at PSG was set to expire last summer, which would have allowed him to join Real Madrid, a club with which he has been flirting for several years, on a free transfer. Urged to stay another season, including by Emmanuel Macron, after two months, he was talking about leaving again. In June, Mbappé made clear that he would not sign a contract extension, allowing him to join Madrid for free next summer. PSG responded by leaving him out of the squad to tour Japan and effectively putting him up for sale. Al-Hilal promptly made a €1bn offer: €300m to PSG plus €700m to Mbappé as a year’s salary — leaving him free to join Madrid for nothing in summer 2024. PSG accepted but Mbappé is said to have turned it down, reluctant to spend another year being extraordinarily well remunerated by a petrostate while playing in a league that is far too easy for him.

It is, of course, a ridiculous sum. But it would draw attention to the Saudi league and, perhaps, in the very long term, that is worth it (and, given the scale of other Saudi investments, perhaps an extra €1bn doesn’t feel so much). At which point it’s worth saying that nobody seems quite sure what the endgame is. There is no sense yet that Saudi investment in sport has deflected attention from human rights abuses; if anything, it has shone a spotlight on them. There has been talk that the investment is aimed at serving the growing youth demographic in Saudi Arabia but, if that is true, a £1bn investment in golf seems a curious way of going about it.

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This is all taking place under the umbrella of Vision 2030, a $7trillion initiative to diversify the Saudi economy beyond oil. The sporting investments are not intended to be profitable in and of themselves — but neither was Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea. They are projections of soft power that can help normalise external perceptions of Saudi Arabia, making it easier for businesses to trade there, while offering a route into the heart of western European society. Put bluntly, it’s better for the Saudi economy if the popular image of the country is not mass executions and the dismemberment of journalists, but Ronaldo and Newcastle United.

Mbappé probably won’t take up Al-Hilal’s offer but it’s significant that it has been made at all. This is modern football, in which a Saudi club can offer a Qatar-owned club a world-record fee, all as part of a their national investment strategy and foreign policy. It’s a very long way from the innocence of a TV shop window in Fort William in 1982. And while football never was an innocent celebration of physical prowess, as the Saudi influence spreads, it has rarely felt as far from any sort of Corinthian ideal. Mbappé may be a luxury player who has spent much of his career dodging the dirty work; but he may also be — just talk about him may be — just what the Saudis need to make the world forget the bone-saws.

The football they played in iridescent heat on sun-bleached grass that shimmered an unfamiliar green on television screens across the world; the patterns they had found in their vibrant yellow shirts had an artistry about them, a grace that enraptured the world. “Other teams thrill us and make us respect them,” wrote Hugh McIlvanney in the Observer. “The Brazilians at their finest gave us pleasure so natural and deep as to be a vivid physical experience.” Just as the moon landings had been a triumph of human ingenuity, so Brazil’s World Cup win seemed somehow transcendent, a celebration of the best of humanity.

At its heart was Pelé, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento. As a 17-year-old, he had scored twice in the 1958 final as Brazil won their first World Cup. In 1962, as Brazil won again, he had been injured early in the tournament. In 1966, brutal tackling had bullied him and Brazil out in the group stage. Disillusioned, he quit the national side but even after being coaxed back, there had been doubts as to whether he would make the squad in 1970 after the coach João Saldanha began to question his eyesight. But Saldanha was sacked on the eve of the tournament, Pelé was restored and, at 29, he enjoyed his apotheosis.

He scored in the final, a magnificently athletic header, but what is best remembered is his lay-off for the overlapping Carlos Alberto to make it 4-1 in the final seconds, a team goal of mesmerising fluency to crown the tournament. The pause, the timing, the awareness… This was football of the very highest level. Pelé had risen from horrendous poverty to become probably the most revered sportsman on the planet. He was painted by Andy Warhol, who commented that Pelé would have “15 centuries” of fame.

Pelé’s lob from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia; the header that drew the stunning save from Gordon Banks; the dummy on the Uruguay goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz — none of them resulted in goals, but that seemed not to matter. This was about more than winning or losing, bureaucratic notches on a scoreboard. It was about the greater glory of being and the game. And there was even perhaps, for those minded to see it, in the famous photograph of him and Bobby Moore exchanging shirts after Brazil had beaten England, an image of racial harmony.

There has been a sense ever since of football trying to recapture the spirit of 1970. The more apt comparison from the previous year is perhaps less the moon landings than Woodstock, a festival of love and artistry that now embodies a moment of lost possibility with Pelé as its pregnant Joan Baez. And yet, like Woodstock, the idealised image of the 1970 World Cup was largely illusory.

The popular conception of Woodstock, great crowds revelling in the possibility of peace while listening to Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival, stems largely from the over-idealised Michael Woodleigh documentary, released three months before the 1970 World Cup. In reality, it was chaos: several acts performed hours late, anarchists broke down a fence to admit thousands without paying, two people were killed (one run over by a tractor).

The 1970 World Cup, similarly, becomes a much darker event as soon as you peer beyond the brilliance of Brazil’s football. Mexico was ruled by the US-backed Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which was engaged in a constant war with Left-wing student and guerrilla groups. Torture and extrajudicial killings were commonplace: the World Cup fell between two massacres of student demonstrators by government forces, one in 1968 and one in 1971. Brazil itself was under a military dictatorship led by the hard-line General Emílio Médici (that Saldanha was an outspoken Leftist was one of the major reasons for his removal as coach). The World Cup success was, along with short-term economic growth, framed as part of the “Brazilian Miracle” he and his repressive policies had supposedly made possible. To call Pelé a stooge of the regime, as many have, or to criticise him for not speaking out, is perhaps unreasonable — but he was undeniably the face of a major propaganda success for Médici.

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And yet, in World Cup terms, 1970 does represent an age of lost innocence. Football can be divided into two eras, ancient and modern, with the moment of transition falling in the mid-Sixties, when it became a game of systems rather than individuals. England won in 1966 because of their pressing and their revolutionary adoption of a rugged 4-4-2 formation. It was functional rather than spectacular and drew criticism from almost everybody (until it worked). Football as a romantic game was over. The 1970 tournament was celebrated as a brave new world of attacking potential; rather it was, even if Brazil were rather better organised than the samba cliché had it, a throwback to what had gone before because the heat and humidity of Mexico made the physical exertion demanded by a systematised game impossible.

But football was changing off the pitch as well as on it. Since 1961, the president of Fifa had been Stanley Rous, a former schoolteacher from Suffolk who had refereed the 1934 FA Cup final. He tended to work from home, making occasional flights to Fifa’s small office in Zurich, and was sceptical about expanding the game beyond its European and South American heartlands. He tried to ignore politics altogether, which in part explains the lack of qualms about the 1970 World Cup being played in Mexico.

That policy, though, never particularly practical, created two major problems. He opposed the ban that had been imposed on apartheid South Africa and then, in 1973, he refused to listen to Soviet protests against playing the second leg of their qualifying play-off against Chile in Santiago’s Estadio Nacional, which was being used as a torture and detention centre by the Pinochet regime after the coup against Salvador Allende.

His clumsy handling of both issues, allied to a perception he was an old-school British colonialist, led to Rous’s defeat in Fifa’s presidential elections shortly before the 1974 World Cup. The man who beat him was the Brazilian João Havelange, the son of an arms dealer who had been an Olympic swimmer. A year later, Havelange appointed as his technical director Sepp Blatter, a Swiss businessman who, while working for Longines, had the revelation that rather than the Olympics paying watch-manufacturers to use their timing apparatus, the watch-manufacturers should pay the Olympics for the exposure. This was a whole new world. The following year, Blatter completed the negotiation of a huge sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola. Football’s commercial age had begun.

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Everything in football now is corporate. The ban on beer at the Qatar World Cup and Budweiser’s fury was a rare example of local culture winning out over commerce. And Pelé too was infected: from Puma to Snickers to Viagra to diamonds made by heating his hair under extreme pressure, there was nothing he wouldn’t advertise or monetise. Perhaps it is fitting that one of the last tweets posted from his official account was used to advertise his new clothing range.

Pelé was smooth and charming, a safe pair of hands. His 1970 teammate Tostão has a theory about the use of nicknames in Brazilian football, that the clamour around players makes it useful for stars to split themselves in two: the public figure (the nickname) and the private (the “real” name). For Pelé, he said, that divided self ceased to exist: the mask became the man. “He says that Edson is separate from Pelé, but I don’t see it,” he said in an interview with The Blizzard. “The only one that exists is the public Pelé. He adapted from the age of 15 to becoming a public figure. He passes the impression of never going through depression, anxiety, anguish, sadness as a consequence of loss of identity. He’s happy, well adapted. He’s always smiling and upbeat. You never see him bad tempered. He loves being Pelé.” Even when one of Pelé’s sons was admitted to a drug rehabilitation clinic, it became a public event, something of which Tostão was sharply critical. By coincidence (and it wasn’t planned; I was the editor), on the next page of the magazine was an advert for artwork signed and endorsed by Pelé.

Of course, plenty of people exploit their fame to make money. Nobody should criticise somebody who grew up in the poverty Pelé did for pursuing every opportunity they can. But that doesn’t mean that there cannot be sadness for what he became and what football has become. Amid the dictatorships, there was something beautiful about 1970. The feelings of wonder Brazil and Pelé evoked at the time were not fake, nor should they be invalidated by context: art can flourish in the most brutal of places.

But equally it’s impossible now not to look back at that tournament and see what might have been for football. Perhaps an increased level of tactical complexity was inevitable; it is probably desirable even if it complicates the simple tales of heroes and villains that many still desire. Increasing commercialism was probably also inevitable and has arguably in some ways been beneficial — but, still, in the silent pause before Pelé’s lay-off to Carlos Alberto, in that moment of perfect stillness, there is a glimpse of a better world.

Members of the EU establishment have been quick to spin the issue as a problem limited to a few bad apples. Several European Parliament officials told Politico the allegations were limited to a “few individuals” who had gone astray. Others, however, expect more names to be drawn into the widening dragnet. But whether or not the scandal extends to other people is beside the point. By focusing on “Qatargate”, we risk losing sight of the fact that the scandal is a symptom of a much deeper and more widespread malaise, involving not just the European Parliament but all EU institutions. Bribery and corruption are endemic to the Brussels system — and most of it is perfectly legal.

It is estimated that there are more than 30,000 lobbyists working in Brussels, making it the second capital of lobbying in the world after Washington, DC. Most are in the service of corporations and their lobby groups, with huge sums at their disposal: the combined lobbying budget of the 12,400 companies and organisations on the EU lobby register has grown steadily over the years — especially since the pandemic — and today amounts to €1.8 billion.

Topping the list are Big Tech, Big Pharma and Big Energy giants such as Apple, Google, Meta, Bayer and Shell, as well as industry associations such as the European Chemical Industry Council, the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), and BusinessEurope — all of which declare annual lobbying budgets of €4-6 million. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, given the long history of businesses under-reporting their spending.

Big Pharma and Big Tech, in particular, both significantly boosted their lobbying firepower throughout the pandemic. EFPIA alone — which represents Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson — increased its spending by 20% in 2020. A conservative estimate of total annual EU lobby spending by Big Pharma is now close to €40 million per year, with nearly 300 lobbyists officially working in Brussels to push the industry’s interests (though the actual number is probably higher, since disclosure rules do not capture all the spending on law firms, academic partnerships and activities in individual countries).

It’s safe to say the investment was amply repaid: by the end of 2021, the EU had signed €71 billion worth of confidential contracts, securing up to 4.6 billion doses of vaccines (more than ten doses for each European citizen). EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen negotiated its biggest deal yet with Pfizer — for up to 1.8 billion doses, worth up to €35 billion if fully exercised — via a series of text messages with the company’s chief. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into the matter.

Such extreme cases, however, mask the true extent of the structural problem that pervades every aspect of the Brussels system. It goes without saying that this army of well-funded lobbyists, which far outnumbers and outspends public interest groups, gives corporations a massive influence over the European decision-making and legislative process. Lobbyists in the EU also have privileged access to decision-makers: the biggest companies and lobby organisations hold hundreds of meetings with the European Commission every year. Between December 2019 and May 2022, for example, the von der Leyen Commission engaged in a staggering number of 500 meetings with representatives and lobbyists of the oil, gas and coal companies — close to one meeting every working day.

Since the start of the war, the arms industry has also (very successfully) ramped up its lobbying efforts, using the resulting uncertainty to whitewash its image and position itself as an essential partner that can provide the necessary tools to ensure security. In the days following Putin’s invasion, the German arms lobby group BDSV even went as far as asking the EU to “recognise the defence industry as a positive contribution to social sustainability”.

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Meanwhile, corporate lobbyists across the board now dominate membership of the Commission’s many advisory groups. Unsurprisingly, this influence can easily result in biased advice. Research by watchdog groups has revealed that 75% of lobby meetings of Commissioners and high-level Commission officials are with lobbyists representing big business. In key areas such as financial regulation, digital services, the internal market and international trade policy, this figure rises to over 80%. This is particularly worrying if we consider that a very large portion of the laws adopted by national parliaments — on issues ranging from food security to the working conditions of truck drivers — are decided at the EU level and then simply transposed into national law by national parliaments.

To make things worse, despite the existence of a lobby register, there is relatively little oversight over the whole process. Indeed, the requirement for lobbyists to sign up to the bloc’s Transparency Register only became mandatory last year. Until then, the entire system functioned on a voluntary basis, which naturally led to massive under-reporting of lobbying activities. This placed the EU well below the standards of liberal democracies such as the United States, and even of several member states.

Yet even now, several loopholes remain. While high-ranking Commission officials and the European Parliament’s committee chairs and rapporteurs who draft legislative proposals are required to log and disclose their meetings with stakeholders, regular MEPs — who actually vote on the proposals — and lower-tier staff, such as assistants from the Parliament and the Commission, are only encouraged to do so. The European Parliament, as Alberto Alemanno, EU Law professor at HEC Paris, has noted, “is the only institution that basically has virtually no rules imposed on their representatives and very weak enforcement of those ethical rules”.

Moreover, the EU register only requires an annual update, and does not provide meaningful information about lobbying on specific laws and policy issues, making it hard to track lobbying activities. And then there is the infamous Brussels “revolving door”, which allows Commissioners, MEPs and EU officials to go straight into lobby jobs when they leave office — such as Commission President Barroso’s recent move to Goldman Sachs and Commissioner and Neelie Kroes’s switch to Uber and Bank of America. The door also swings the other way: the current executive director of the European Medicines Agency, Emer Cooke, previously worked for the EFPIA, Europe’s largest pharmaceutical lobbying organisation.

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Pro-EU reformers say these problems can be resolved with institutional tinkering, such as extending the requirement to disclose their meetings with lobbyists to all EU officials, introducing stricter codes of conduct, and setting up an ethics committee overseeing all EU institutions. Some claim the problem is the opaque nature of the EU’s legislative process, which makes it practically impossible not only for citizens but even for national parliaments “to scrutinise how their national representatives have acted”, as Emily O’Reilly, the official European Ombudsman, admitted. Others argue that the solution is to “democratise the EU” by strengthening the European Parliament.

But all these proposals miss the point: the EU, by virtue of its supranational and technocratic nature, is structurally prone to capture by vested interests, be they foreign governments or multinational corporations — and no amount of reform will change that. The problem of lobbying exists at the national level as well, of course. However, this is hugely exacerbated at the supranational level. As the researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli write: “International loci are in general physically, psychologically, and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are. This distance means more room for oligarchic capture.” It is telling in this respect that most Europeans have no idea who the President of the European Parliament is.

In this sense, the problem of EU corruption, rather than being a bug in the system, should be seen as an inherent consequence of the supranationalisation of politics. Making the EU “more democratic” won’t change the fact that the lack of a European demos represents an insurmountable obstacle to the creation of a European democracy, even if Brussels was interested in going in that direction (which it isn’t). The number of corrupt officials involved in the amateurish Qatargate scandal is of little importance; for the EU, it is already too late.

Generally, the public mood on armbands and bent knees seems to be split. There are those who assume every organised public gesture in the name of human rights must be altruistically intentioned and beneficial. And then there are those who dismiss all such gestures as self-interested attempts to gain social capital. The relation between the two looks symbiotic: the more enthusiastically the first group don flags, lanyards, and armbands, the more obstinately the second group insists there is nothing but self-promotion at the end of this particular rainbow.

Prospects of a more nuanced take aren’t helped by Left-wing lip service to universal human rights, combined in practice with squeamishness about saying anything robust in their favour which might exacerbate racial or non-Christian religious sensitivities. One only has to compare the relatively muted and qualified response of Stonewall to the stabbing-to-death of three gay men in Reading in 2021 (perpetrator: a militant Libyan asylum seeker with a history of violence) to last week’s impassioned response to a US shooting in a gay nightclub  (perpetrator: a white American with a history of threatening to blow up his mum’s house — although, in an inconvenient plot twist, he has since come out as non-binary).

Apart from leaving the stage clear for Right-wing commentators to claim the divisive spoils, the Left’s squeamishness about cultural insensitivity also entails that activist gestures are most plentiful in the contexts where they are least needed. The safest space for full-throated political activism is apparently one where you can rely on the audience’s proximity to your own values, not to mention their repressed politeness and fear of being judged as the bad people. Many tolerant people in the UK are by now very fed up with all the needless hectoring and guilt-tripping.

This hectoring reaches its apotheosis during the annual farce of Transgender Day of Remembrance in the UK. Nagged into it by Stonewall and other transactivist organisations, last week various institutions fell over themselves to mark the murders of precisely zero UK trans people during the previous year with various fulsome tributes. Perhaps imaginatively accompanied by visions of the Last Post bleakly ringing out over the Somme, the Welsh Parliament even dramatically tweeted out: “Today, we remember the trans individuals who have lived, loved, fought and fallen.”

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Yet for UK political institutions to address a major factor in the majority of trans murders worldwide — working in the sex trade — not only would they have to address male violence and sex-buying, they would also have to take a public stand in some extremely macho and homophobic cultures overseas. Much easier, then, to put all such deaths down to amorphous “transphobia” and then return to the main task of leveraging irrational guilt out of soft-touch Lefties for the purposes of cash extraction and power consolidation.

But those on the Right should not think themselves off the hook either. On the side of those fulminating on Twitter about Kane’s supposed virtue-signalling were various socially conservative and post-liberal types, disapproving of the arrogance involved in imposing Western values on the Qatari nation. This position was, perhaps inadvertently, well-summed up by French captain Hugo Lloris. “When we are in France, when we welcome foreigners, we often want them to follow our rules, to respect our culture, and I will do the same when I go to Qatar, quite simply,” he said last week. “I can agree or disagree with their ideas, but I have to show respect.”

It’s likely Lloris said this for the sake of an easy life. But a growing number these days seem relatively uncritical — even occasionally offering qualified approval — of authoritarian regimes, partly because they are distinctly disillusioned with Western liberalism. Specifically, they are tired with the way that the internal logic of liberalism apparently results in endless quests for new forms of “freedom” — religious, sexual, bodily, and so on — with the result that traditional social structures such as marriage, the family, and local community have been undermined. Whereas many liberals on both the Left and Right would present things such as the advent of the Pill, no-fault divorce, commercial surrogacy, and rampant bodily modification as having no downsides whatsoever, post-liberals tend to be much more focused on what has been lost in terms of social cohesion and stability, and also upon the apparent moral and spiritual emptiness of what replaces it.

I’m not saying that these critics of liberalism would admire a country partly run under Sharia law. I’m suggesting, rather, that keen awareness of the limits of the dominant Western political model tends to make one less likely to criticise more authoritarian alternatives. And yet, no one should kid himself that failing to object vociferously to the imprisonment of gay men, or to the forcing of women to be dependent on male guardians for all their major life decisions, is a simple mark of respect for a less fractured and narcissistic culture than our own. Unless an unabashed cultural relativist, even the most post of the post-libs should acknowledge that personal autonomy — in the basic sense of being able to choose what you do — is a universally important moral and political value, whatever else is also valuable.

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This seems to be well-recognised with respect to the past, with leading post-liberal writers such as Patrick Deneen rightly decrying slavery. Qatari women and sexual minorities, living in the here and now, deserve no less a defence. Radical feminists have long complained of the tendency of liberal feminists to go suspiciously quiet when it comes to the authoritarian repression of women in non-Western cultures or minority communities. Post-liberals must not make the same mistake. And nor should they tell themselves that Qatari women don’t know what they are missing. It might be true that women in medieval England couldn’t miss what they didn’t know they didn’t have — but unlike them, Qatari women have at least some access to the internet.

Another source of reluctance to intervene here might be a general scepticism about the notion of human rights. Certainly, there’s no need to be credulous about every audaciously solipsistic claim made in the name of the “rights” of an identity group. It’s also reasonable, in my view, to have a relatively pared down account of what human rights actually are: not quasi-religious edicts coming down to us from some mysterious ethical realm on high, but rather requirements derived from basic and universal human needs, articulated in terms of the minimum standard required for well-being and not the maximum. We can argue about whether free movement across the globe is a human right in this sense, but it would be difficult to argue that free movement around your own village is not.

So, though it’s a shame that Kane eventually bottled it, I think it’s great that he initially wanted to take a public stand in Qatar. Despite what Piers Morgan thinks, whether a gesture like armband-wearing counts as “virtue-signalling” surely depends on the context. Within relatively progressive enclaves in the UK, public gestures in favour of values most people already hold there are superfluous — and the primary motive for them does indeed start to look like a desire to show off your moral superiority rather than to tackle the political non-issue in question.

But in profoundly illiberal Qatar, things are very different. I see no reason not to take any armband-wearing over there as a sincere and admirable attempt to speak up for the rights of oppressed others, and it seems to me highly uncharitable to take it any other way. Hell, never mind Qatar — in UK football, things are also very different. As is well-known, there are almost certainly gay players in the Premier League but none who will dare come out publicly, so great is the stigma. In either of these contexts, then — despite the critics — a rainbow armband or two is surely a wonderful thing.

Still, the video got its message across: it’s really happening. The widest aerial shots reveal an enormous groove in the sand, stretching to the horizon. We are seeing the birth of “The Line”, an insanely ambitious project for a city extending 170km through the desert, sandwiched in a narrow space between two immense walls. The new construction footage is an update on the viral CGI trailers that overwhelmed the internet last year, showing us glimpses of what life will be like inside this linear chasm of a city: a city where there will be no cars or roads, where every amenity is always a five-minute walk away, and where, according to one planning document, there could be robot maids.

This scheme sounds mad enough, but The Line is only the centrepiece of a much bigger development, called Neom (a blend of neo and mustaqbal, Arabic for “future”). Neom will be a semi-autonomous state, encompassing 26,000 square kilometres of desert with new resorts and tech industry centres.

There may be no philosopher kings, but there are sci-fi princes. The dreams of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the Neom board, make the techno-futurism of Silicon Valley look down to earth. Bin Salman is especially fond of the cyber-punk genre of science fiction, which involves gritty hi-tech dystopias. He has enlisted a number of prominent Hollywood visual specialists for the Neom project, including Olivier Pron of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. A team of consultants was asked to develop science-fiction aesthetics for a tourist resort, resulting in “37 options, arranged alphabetically from ‘Alien Invasion’ to ‘Utopia’”. One proposal for a luxury seaside destination, which featured a glowing beach of crushed marble, was deemed insufficiently imaginative.

Such spectacular indulgence must be causing envy among the high-flying architects and creative consultants not yet invited to join the project — if there are any left. But it also makes the moral dimension difficult to ignore: how should we judge those jumping on board bin Salman’s gravy train? Saudi Arabia — in case anyone has forgotten in the years since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at its consulate in Istanbul — is a brutal authoritarian state.

In recent weeks, this has prompted some soul-searching in the architecture community, with several stinging rebukes aimed at Neom. Writing in Dezeen, the urbanist Adam Greenfield asks firms such as Morphosis, the California-based architects designing The Line, to consider “whether the satisfaction of working on this project, and the compensation that attends the work, will ever compensate you for your participation in an ecological and moral atrocity”. Ouch. Greenfield’s intervention came a week after Rowan Moore asked in The Observer: “When will whatever gain that might arise from the creation of extraordinary buildings cease to outweigh the atrocities that go with them?”

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You see, bin Salman’s blank slate in the desert was not actually blank (they never are); settlements belonging to the Huwaitat tribespeople have been ruthlessly flattened to make space for Neom. One man leading resistance to the clearances, Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, was killed by security forces in 2020, and three others have been sentenced to execution. Critics also point to the absurd pretence that The Line is an eco-friendly project, given the industrial operations needed to build and maintain a city for nine million people in searing desert temperatures.

There is an obvious parallel here with the criticism of celebrities and commentators taking part in the World Cup in Qatar, another unsavoury petro-state. International sporting events are notorious for giving legitimacy to dictatorships, so why wouldn’t we see architectural monuments in the same way? With Neom there is barely a distinction to draw. Zaha Hadid Architects, the British firm that designed one of the Qatari football stadiums — a project synonymous with the shocking treatment of migrant construction workers — is also working on one of the Neom sites, an artificial ski resort that will host the 2029 Asian Winter Games.

In the 21st century, Western architects have helped to burnish the image of repressive regimes, especially those big-name architects who specialise in spectacular monumental buildings. Zaha Hadid was the most wide-ranging: her trademark swooshing structures include a museum honouring the ruling family in Azerbaijan and a conference hall in Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya (never completed due to Gaddafi’s demise). But the biggest patrons of globetrotting architects have been the Arab Gulf States — especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — along with China. Among countless examples in these regions, the most infamous is probably Rem Koolhaas’s Chinese Television Headquarters in Beijing, a suitably sinister-looking building for a state organisation that shapes the information diet of hundreds of millions of people each day.

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The uncomfortable truth is that autocrats and architects share complimentary motivations. The former use architecture to glorify their regimes, both domestically and internationally, whereas the latter are attracted to the creative freedom that only unconstrained state power can provide. In democratic societies, there is always tension between the grand visions of architects and the numerous interest groups that have a say in the final result. Why compromise with planning restrictions and irate neighbours when there is a dictator who, as Greenfield puts it, “offers you a fat purse for sharing the contents of your beautiful mind with the world?”

This is not just speculation. As Koolhaas himself stated: “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost nobody that we know of today could even afford or contemplate.”

But really this relationship between architect and state is a triangle, with financial interests making up the third pole. Despite the oft-repeated line that business loves the stability offered by the rule of law, when it comes to building things, the money-men are as fond of the autocrat’s empty canvas as the architects are. When he first pitched the Neom project to investors in 2017, bin Salman told them: “Imagine if you are the governor of New York without having any public demands. How much would you be able to create for the companies and the private sector?”

This points us to the deeper significance of the Gulf States and China as centres of high-profile architecture. These were crucial regions for post-Nineties global capitalism: the good illiberal states. Celebrity architects brought to these places the same spectacular style of building that was appearing in Europe and North America; each landmark “iconic” and distinct but, in their shared scale and audacity, also placeless and generic. Such buildings essentially provided a seal of legitimacy for the economic and financial networks of globalisation. Can this regime’s values really be so different to ours, an investor might say, when they have a museum by Jean Nouvel, or an arts centre by Norman Foster? British architects build football stadiums and skyscrapers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while those governments own football stadiums and skyscrapers in Britain, such as The Shard and Newcastle’s St James’s Park.

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This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy: the ethical issues of working for repressive states have often been debated by architects. When the tide of liberal capitalism seemed to be coming in around the world, they could say, and believe, that their buildings were optimistic gestures, representing a hoped-for convergence around a single global modernity. It is the collapse of those illusions over the last decade that makes such reasoning look increasingly suspect.

With Neom, bin Salman is making explicit the publicity value of architecture, by pushing it to a whole new degree. Aware that breakthroughs in clean energy would essentially render his kingdom a stranded asset, he is trying to rebrand Saudi Arabia as a high-tech green state. He offers investors a package they, like many architects, dream about: breath-taking novelty and innovation, combined with sustainability and an apparent humanistic concern.

But ironically, what bin Salman has really shown is that architects are increasingly unnecessary for conveying political messages. They are being replaced by those masters of unreality who use digital technology to the same ends, like the Marvel film magicians creating a vision of Neom in the global imagination. Whether or not a city like The Line actually exists is almost beside the point in terms of its publicity value. After all, this is an era where the superhero realm of Wakanda is praised as a depiction of Africa, and where America tore itself apart for four years over a wall that never actually came into being.

Likewise, given the technological challenges involved, we can be certain the vast furrow appearing in the Saudi desert will never become The Line as portrayed in the promotional videos. But videos will be enough to project the desired image of an innovative, progressive state. That bin Salman himself might really believe in his futuristic city, encouraged by his army of paid-up designers, will only make him a better salesman.

In his book Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good, Maurice Glasman argues that globalisation is destructive because it prioritises global market economics over democratic national sovereignty. Brexit was an important step in rebalancing this relationship; the democratic nation state reclaiming lost ground to the forces of international capital. The book ends with a clever aphorism: “Workers of the word unite, you have nothing to lose but your supply chains.”

Nowhere is this tension between globalisation and the nation state clearer than on the football pitch. Consider, for instance, the supply chains of Glasman’s beloved Tottenham Hotspur: Lloris (France), Son (South Korea), Sánchez (Colombia), Højbjerg (Denmark), Gil (Spain), Royal (Brazil), Perišić (Croatia), Romero (Argentina), Sarr (Senegal), Bissouma (Ivory Coast). Asking what encourages these men to leave their home communities is like that famous Mrs Merton question to Debbie McGee: “What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?” Son and Kane are on nearly £200,000 a week; Perišić is on £178,000. Premier League footballers may kiss their club badge when they score, but gone are the days when they would stay with one club their whole career. Now they follow the money — and the money frequently comes from the dodgiest of places: Saudi despots and Russians oligarchs. As Glasman has written: “If globalisation is understood as the process through which finance capital escapes the bonds of domestic constraints in order to maximise returns, then the establishment of the Premier League created globalisation in one country.”

Yet rejecting globalisation is not the same as shunning internationalism, a distinction Glasman makes clear. If the Premier League represents all that is bad about globalisation, the World Cup indicates something of the virtues of internationalism. Since 2007, England players have donated the relatively modest remuneration they get for playing for their country to charity. They play for the pride. Yet isn’t this precisely the sort of nationalist sentiment that many liberal globalists complain about, imagining only beer-swilling Brexit bigots with large bellies, foul mouths, and racist imaginations?

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It is the kind of worldview derided by Gordon Brown. He continues on his tirade against nationalism: “The win-win economics of mutually-beneficial commerce is being replaced by the zero-sum rivalries of ‘I win, you lose’, as movements such as ‘America first’, ‘China first’, ‘India first’, and ‘Russia first’ threaten to descend into an us versus them geopolitics of ‘my country first and only’.” In other words, leave grown-up politics to those of us economically literate enough to understand things like gilts and the exchange rate mechanism. This sense of superiority coupled with the dismissal of national pride as a form of bigotry is precisely what led to Brexit. How did the soft liberal-Left become captured by the values of the global economic order? When did it lose faith in the nation state as a fellowship of free-born subjects whose commitment to their country is a way of expressing their commitment to each other, to what Glasman rightly celebrates as “the common good”?

I hold no candle for Liz Truss. She died at the hand of the ideology she was keenest to promote. But even her most ardent critics should not have been quite so sanguine about a prime minister of this country being brought down by market forces. Yes, it’s more than a little ironic: those who live by the sword die by the sword. But surely none of us want our democratically-elected representatives having to pay fealty to the global money gods. If Corbyn had won in 2019, the Left would have gone ballistic had he been brought down by the global economic order, and rightly so. We always have a choice. Better to be poorer than live with these sorts of chains.

The nation state is the ultimate backstop to democratic virtue. That’s why democratic nationalism is an inherently good thing — which, by the way, is not the same as the poisonous philosophy of ethnic nationalism. Likewise, economic nationalism is not some sort of “me first” chauvinism to which Brown refers, it is simply the idea that the way we order our finances should be decided in Birmingham and Bradford, not in Brussels or by international money markets. Wasn’t it Brown who gave us that speech, “British jobs for British workers”? What happened to that?

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As it happens, Brown is a massive football fan. He went to his first Raith Rovers game when he was seven and soon started to sell programmes outside the ground in Kirkcaldy. He recalls questioning his father — a virtuous Church of Scotland minister — when he applauded the good play of Raith’s opponents. For all his talk of international cooperation, it seems he saw nothing wrong with a “Raith first” philosophy from the terraces of Stark’s Park. It’s an expression of solidarity not hostility to the other. And the same is true of “England first” in Qatar. Had Scotland qualified, I suspect even a determined internationalist like Brown would have felt a wave of pride. Of course he would. “Scotland first” just means: this is the team I root for — just as nationalism is about rooting for the people I live among.

There is no doubt the World Cup stinks of greed too. Qatar had almost no footballing culture when it won the bid to host it, not to mention its dodgy human rights record. But for all its many faults, what happens on the pitch during the World Cup represents a kind of nationalist fellow-feeling that is exceedingly rare in the “me first” culture of professional football. When you play for your country, you play for love. Those proud citizens of nowhere who denigrate the nation state as the crucible of so much of what is bad in our political life ought to turn on their television sets over the next few weeks. “Three lions on a shirt” is not some sort of gateway drug to fascism. On the contrary, national pride is precisely the reason that these teams come from every corner of the world to compete.

And yet, it’s impossible not to approach Qatar with a sense of unease. This is the first World Cup since 1934 to be hosted by a nation that has not previously played in it; why is Qatar so keen to be involved that it has spent an estimated $220 billion on staging the event?

The answer is timeless: hosting the World Cup has always been a political act. When Uruguay staged the first tournament in 1930, Juan Campisteguy’s government underwrote the costs of travelling teams because it believed the tournament would promote the country’s centenary of independence. The gamble paid off; Uruguay went on to beat Argentina 4-2 in the final.

This was nothing compared to what happened in Italy four years later. Mussolini was well-aware of the propagandistic potential of sport, often being photographed riding a horse or skiing. In 1933, when he met Engelbert Dollfuss at the beach resort of Riccione, he donned a pair of swimming trunks while the diminutive Austrian Chancellor wore a sober suit. “When you compete abroad,” Mussolini told Italian athletes, “the honour and sporting principle of the nation is entrusted to your muscles and above all your spirit.”

No doubt the Antwerp Olympics of 1920 were at the back of his mind, when the Italian athletes who turned up were a dishevelled bunch who sang the “Red Flag”. Twelve years later, they arrived in Los Angeles dressed in matching black shirts and singing “Giovinezza”, the hymn of the Italian Fascist Party. They went on to finish second in the medals table. Victories abroad, as Il Littorale noted as early as 1928, “were clear signs of racial superiority that are destined to reflect in many fields outside of sport”.

Whether Italy’s football coach throughout the Thirties, Vittorio Pozzo, was a Fascist remains contested, but he certainly benefited from the regime’s focus on muscular leadership. “The norms that govern the game,” he said, “impose the principles of authority, without which order cannot exist.” His side at the 1934 World Cup was brisk and physical and found referees benevolent. As the journalist Gianni Brera observed in his great history of Italian football, Louis Baert, the Belgian who oversaw the quarter-final against Spain, “behaved as if he were well-aware where the game was taking place”, while there were numerous rumours about meetings between Mussolini and the Swedish referee Ivan Eklind, who unusually refereed both Italy’s semi-final and the final.

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Not that anybody in Italy much cared about the controversies, as Simon Martin’s Football and Fascism makes clear. In La Gazzetta della Sport, Bruno Roghi wrote of the national team as “little, gallant soldiers who fight for an idea that is greater than them”, while the Florentine Fascist weekly Il Bargello described the World Cup win as “the affirmation of an entire people, an indication of its virile and moral strength”.

It wasn’t, though, just about winning the World Cup. It was also about projecting the idea of Italy as a modern nation. There had been heavy investment in stadiums for a decade before the tournament. Fans from France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were subsidised to come to Italy. Tickets were printed on high-quality paper to encourage visitors to keep them, and the Fascist insignia they bore, as souvenirs. The Futurist artist Filippo Marinetti was commissioned to design a poster that focused on a powerful, thrusting figure in Italian kit and bore the fasces in one corner. Stamps produced for the tournament pursued a similar theme.

Foreign journalists were impressed, to the delight of the Italian media. “The spontaneous and heartfelt statements of our foreign colleagues,” Roghi wrote in La Gazzetta, “are more than sufficient to show Mussolini’s Italy — that was once little Italy of all improvisations and apologies — has organised the festival of football with the style, flexibility, precision, even the courtesy and meticulousness that indicated an absolute maturity and preparedness.” His response was extreme but not uncommon. It was a similar eagerness to show off the Estado Novo that led the Getúlio Vargas regime to bid for Brazil to host the 1942 World Cup — although by the time that tournament was finally played, in 1950, Vargas had been deposed.

Argentina was chosen as host for the 1978 tournament in 1966, the bid of one military junta ultimately inherited by another. This political chaos was reflected in the official logo, which was based on the arms-clasped-above-head gesture of Juan Perón, who had briefly returned to power in 1973 before dying and being succeeded by his wife, Isabel, who was ousted three years later in a coup. Before the tournament was held, slums were destroyed or hidden from view, dissidents rounded up, and around a tenth of the national budget spent on constructing or redeveloping stadiums. Most important: Argentina won.

Whether, as is widely believed, the success sustained the junta in power is difficult to assess, but two details seem telling. First, about ten minutes’ walk from El Monumental, the stadium where Argentina beat the Netherlands in the final, is the ESMA (the Navy School of Mechanics) which, under the junta, became a notorious torture centre. When the prisoners, hearing the roars of the crowd, celebrated in the cells, General Jorge Acosta, one of the most brutal torturers, took out three of them in his car and wound down the windows so they could see the celebrations on the streets — to show them that their protests against the regime meant nothing beside the eruption of patriotic joy. Second, four years later, after the invasion of the Falklands, Argentinian TV broadcasts were dominated by two things: news from the war, and reruns of the glory of ‘78.

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Qatar, then, is not unique. Every country to have hosted the World Cup has done so with some sort of soft-power objective in mind. Even England, in 1966, saw their triumph blend with the idea of Swinging London: to project an image of a vibrant, modern nation emerging from the gloom and stuffiness of the Fifties and the loss of influence both politically and in football (the 6-3 defeat to Hungary in 1953 was essentially football’s Suez).

But this World Cup does feel different. This is partly down to the corruption that surrounded the award of hosting rights for 2018 and 2022. There is no evidence Qatar did anything wrong, but 16 of the 22 delegates who made the decision have either been convicted or credibly accused of wrongdoing, while many have wondered what was discussed at the lunch, nine days before the vote, between Nicolas Sarkozy, the then-French president, Tamim al-Thani, who has since succeeded his father as Emir of Qatar, and the French then-Uefa president, Michel Platini.

Then there are the well-reported human rights issues, and the fact that, ever since the Gulf states bought up major football clubs and the rights to stage major fights and Formula One races, both the British media and fans are more aware than ever about “sportswashing” — the way sport can be used to present a certain picture of a nation and garner influence. The phenomenon of certain fans backing the stance of the state that owns their club against its critics — see Newcastle fans criticising the fiancée of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; or Manchester City fans insisting on the guilt of Matthew Hedges, who was accused of spying in Abu Dhabi — was familiar even before news broke that Qatar is actively paying fans from certain countries to sing on demand and help police social media.

Meanwhile, for those fans who do stay home, there is a prospect of a winter sitting huddled under blankets, struggling to afford rising energy prices (caused by a war started by the last World Cup hosts), hoping the power cut is over in time to watch the next game, beamed live from a country that is only staging the tournament because of the profits it has made from selling gas. Geopolitics has a sudden immediacy.

The Fifa president Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura wrote this month to each of the 32 competing football federations, urging them not to allow “football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists”. Which is not, on the face of it, unreasonable — were it not for the fact that Qatar hosting a World Cup is itself part of a political battle, and that certain issues cannot be casually dismissed as differences of ideology. The letter speaks of the opportunity “to welcome and embrace everyone, regardless of origin, background, religion, gender, sexual orientation or nationality” — and yet homosexuality is outlawed in Qatar. An existential threat to a group of people is not “an ideological or political battle”; indeed, it runs directly contrary to Article 3 of Fifa’s own statutes, the value of which is now exposed as nil.

Finally, there is the decision not to hold the World Cup in June-July. Perhaps there is a case to be made that the European off-season should not dictate the timing of the World Cup. Why should a raft of countries be disbarred from hosting just because their climate does not fit? But this does not alter the realisation that the bidding process for 2022 was for a tournament to be staged in June and July, and that the rules were changed after Qatar had won when it was decided that maybe trying to play — or watch — football in 40-plus degrees wasn’t a great idea, even with whatever speculative cooling technology was being proposed.

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Covid-related changes to the schedule also have not helped, but the rejig to the Premier League calendar necessitated by the November start means there are just seven days between the final domestic league game and the opening match of the World Cup. There should have been eight, but three months ago the start date was suddenly moved forward by a day, apparently so Qatar could play Ecuador with the eyes of the world upon them, undistracted by three other matches on the same day. The change was made just as a global advertising campaign was launched marking 100 days till the start of the World Cup and immediately rendered inaccurate — the problem perhaps of a society in which royal whim can override years of diligent planning.

To put the lack of break in context, there has never previously been fewer than 16 days between the Champions League final and the first game of the World Cup, so most players have had three-to-four weeks beforehand. This means not only a greater likelihood of fatigue and injury for players, but also a lack of preparation time for national coaches; with the usual two-to-three weeks of build-up reduced to three or four days, how can they work on anything but the most basic planning?

There will be those who question how much this all matters. Football, after all, is only a game. It is just 22 players chasing around an inflated polyurethane sphere. Compared to persecuted minorities and workers toiling in abject conditions, who cares about the football? But the World Cup does matter. It matters to those who play it and those who watch it and those who believe, along with Jules Rimet, that, despite it all, the tournament can be an event that fosters understanding between peoples. And yet, once again, perhaps more than ever, the World Cup finds itself a tool of propaganda, with all that is good about it sublimated to the needs of an authoritarian state. At its heart, the World Cup is an idealistic phenomenon, and those ideals have rarely felt so threatened.

Elizabeth II’s incumbency was so enduring that any number of people lived lives here without such an experience. Now, her passing risks bequeathing something more akin to a shipwreck than a pre-ordained and pre-planned moment in time, the passage of which should bring, as well as grief, the solace of continuity. Britain has become a country in which we are part strangers. Precisely because the Queen prolonged a particular past, this week has been a temporal rupture.

In her spirit still lived her father and grandfather, the kings who, because of the two world wars, reigned over what was probably for the first time an overtly British nation-state, rather than a tenser union of once separate kingdoms. To mourn Elizabeth II is to mourn that 20^th-century Britain. In reality, it was a short era. By the Seventies, something that fighting the two wars had created was already dissolving. But the last genuinely optimistic decade of 20th-century Britain tied the Queen to two iconic imaginative forces that still, in rather different ways, exercise their pull.

In the first, Bobby Moore, born in the East End during the Blitz, climbed the steps at Wembley, and, not wanting to dirty the Queen’s white gloves, wiped his hands, before she handed him the Jules Rimet Trophy. For English football, that summer afternoon has constituted an ideal of greatness against which everything since has fallen short, even as there are any number of ways in which football in Britain is more inclusive than it was on 30 July 1966. If the 56 years of hurt were to end in Qatar this winter, there would be no fusion of the club rituals of football at 3 o’clock on a Saturday with the national team’s victory, no way of avoiding the question of what the World Cup was doing being played in the middle of European domestic seasons in Qatar, and there would be English not Union flags flown in celebration. Much more likely, there will be more years to add to a song written for an occasion where attaining that ideal in the Queen’s presence seemed in touching distance.

The Beatles are the second vehicle of collective emotion, running from war to the Sixties, to which the Queen was connected. John Lennon was born during the Liverpool blitz and Paul McCartney’s parents met in an air raid shelter. They played as children on bombsites. Then, like the Queen in the Fifties, the Beatles became in the Sixties the new outward face of post-war Britain, even as the shadows of the older Britain ran through some of their best songs from A day in the life to Eleanor Rigby. McCartney said that growing up, the Queen seemed akin to a film star: someone it would be impossible for a working-class boy like him to meet. But he did. He’s now a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour. As the Beatles were falling apart in 1968, McCartney, always at home in pre-rock and roll British musical culture, wrote a music-hall style ditty, “almost”, he said, “like a love song”, about the Queen. On Abbey Road, after he finishes singing “And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make”, there is a gap. Then the 23-second Her Majesty begins: the last sound on the last album the Beatles made.

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The age of Queen Elizabeth II could not stop in the Sixties. Through the increasing political and economic fragmentation of the United Kingdom from the Seventies, the Queen served as an exemplary constitutional monarch. She might even be said to have practised denial in the face of what was changing: order being necessary, she knew that a public show of it is required from the person who bears witness to the underlying tumult.

Nothing symbolises the United Kingdom Union, not even the armed forces, as much as the monarchy. The monarch must represent the whole of the Union and be sensitive to its constituent parts. This is much easier said than done. The Queen in part succeeded because deep in her character ran an unwillingness to perform angst against some abstract standard of the way things are supposed to be. The Union is not helped by gimmicks and cannot withstand a lot of tortured contemplation. It just has to be lived as though it were self-evident that it and the tapestry that constitutes it matter. In appointing her last Prime Minister and meeting her end at Balmoral, she may have, at the last, still served the Union well. By appearing while dying with a smile on her face to meet Liz Truss, she has also given what seems like an accidental premiership unfolding in a national emergency a dignity in its beginning that it would not otherwise have.

Without her, though, the monarchy itself is less secure. There will be less of the already severely strained charity bestowed towards those inside it who let it down. Meanwhile, the Queen appears to have been the last tie binding the Sussexes to the Royal Family. If the attacks hit and wounded her anyway, the grief writ across Prince Harry’s face as he arrived at Balmoral tells its own story. Unless the emotions of his dash to Scotland brings reconciliation, the burden of protecting the monarchy from filial and fraternal score-settling now uncomfortably passes to its targets.

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Britain has lived through a not insignificant number of kings and queens who did more to jeopardise the monarchy than to preserve it. By contrast, the Queen made it an institution that attracted admiration, perhaps even abroad some envy. At the very point when there might have appeared every reason to doubt the purpose of a constitutional monarchy so overtly laden with pomp and pageantry, she gave it an almost transcendent purpose.

This achievement was not at all obvious in the first half of her reign. Probably she had not yet accomplished it. There was no war where she could demonstrate her fortitude as George VI did. While she was not born to be Queen and came to the throne at a young age, her accession did not have quite the air of tragedy that gave such meaning to her father’s life as king. She had to become through service the Queen she became, including the Queen who could so delightfully take tea with Paddington. Perhaps the Crown though instant in acquisition must be borne as a pilgrimage. Perhaps his utter inadequacy to the trek was why Edward VIII opted to dump it on his brother and niece. Perhaps it was a simple willingness to meet the longevity of the journey that took her so far. She appeared to find truth in an Aboriginal proverb she quoted in a speech in Australia in 2011: “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home.”

More prosaically, the Queen possessed a seemingly innate capacity to practise self-discipline and humility. Her predictability on such matters is why many self-proclaimed republicans could respect her. Could anyone have doubted that she unhesitatingly would have thought that the Covid rules about funerals applied to the Duke of Edinburgh’s?

Nobody from the outside can know how much over seven decades the Queen sacrificed and where, for better or worse, she reached her limits. Over the past year, what she did not have the physical strength left to do, from the Cenotaph to the State Opening of Parliament, made the nearness of the end apparent. What was left though in the Jubilee was a chance for what is still, for now anyway, the United Kingdom to say thank you while the Queen was alive to receive the gratitude. On the last day, she left Windsor and came to London again to play her part. Now, with the help of the rituals she would have recognised, those of us who want the monarchy to endure through the parting must too try to rise to the change.