UK influencer met senior officials on state-sponsored tours of Iran, fact-checking body finds

A UK television personality went on two state-sponsored tours of Iran this spring where she met senior officials and was “active” in spreading the regime’s message, according to an investigation by a Iranian factchecking organisation.Bushra Shaikh, from Surrey, owned a luxury clothing brand and finished ninth on series 13 of The Apprentice in 2017, where she described herself as “inspired by Coco Chanel”.Shaikh posts on X and Instagram to hundreds of thousands of followers about her appearances on TalkTV and Good Morning Britain withphotographs of her outfits and opinions on rightwing figures such as Laura Loomer and Rupert Lowe.An investigation by Factnameh found that Shaikh played a “highly active role in reproducing the government’s narrative” this spring after taking part in two press tours organised by IRIB World Service, the international arm of Iran’s state broadcaster.Factnameh identified more than a dozen participants in these tours, including a handful of US journalists.Fereidoon Bashar, the executive director of ASL19, which created Factnameh, said cultivating friendly journalists and public figures had been part of Iran’s strategy for some time. “There has been a long tradition of having prominent western figures to Iran who are aligned with anti-imperialist, anti-colonial frameworks,” he said.But since the 12-day conflict between Iran and Israel in June 2025, he said, there had been a “major shift in Iran’s communication approach”.Bashar said: “My thinking is that they’re realising – much like the rest of the world – that a lot of mainstream media is losing their audiences, and these individual influencers are much easier to engage and invite. The content they put out is more likely to align with state narratives, and less likely to be factchecked.”It is unclear whether Shaikh and others covered their own expenses or were paid to do the trip. Bashar said it appeared that the Iranian government valued Shaikh’s content as it invited her back for a second trip in April, after her first tour in February.He said: “The level of access she got the second time around was far higher than the first time around, with high-level officials. Looks like they appreciated her coverage the first time around.”Shaikh’s posts about Iran appeared timed to coincide with critical events in Iran, including the intensification of the conflict, ceasefire talks and nationwide protests in January. Some of this amounted to “broadcasting the unedited propaganda of the Islamic Republic”, Factnameh said.In Shaikh’s visits, which she documented to hundreds of thousands of followers on X, she toured an Armenian monastery and Tehran’s Tajrish bazaar. In one post, she modelled a black and gold scarf that she said was a gift from Iran’s culture minister.She met senior officials, including the governor of Isfahan and the foreign ministry spokesperson, and visited sensitive sites including the strait of Hormuz, where she posed on a boat with the caption “the strait of Hormuz is open for us but closed for the Epstein empire”, appearing to refer to the US.Factnameh found Shaikh’s posts showed a “highly calculated pattern of social media manipulation”. In the past year, 20% of her 4,047 posts have been about Iran and these had generated millions of interactions and “disproportionately high engagement”.Earlier this year, Shaikh’s tours sparked criticism from Iranian digital rights activists, who noticed she appeared to have access to the internet that ordinary people did not, suggesting her trips were at the invitation of the regime. Iranian activists, some affiliated with the Women, Life, Freedom movement, circulated an online petition suggesting Shaikh should be investigated for sanctions violations.Shaikh, meanwhile, shrugged off the internet shutdown in Iran, writing: “It seems those outside of Iran are more bothered about limited internet access for Iranians to the outside world, than Iranians inside Iran themselves. Most don’t see it as a government crackdown but rather temporary citizen security.”Shaikh is part of a growing number of “war influencers” or “war-fluencers”, content creators who offer followers unmediated, at times citizen journalist-style access to a war zone.Several of her posts aimed to offer an on-the-ground look at the effect of US-Israeli strikes against Iran. In one, she describes residential buildings destroyed; in another, she says she investigated a missile strike on a girl’s school in Minab.Israel and Russia have also been reported to use influencers to spread their narratives, especially in the face of more hostile coverage from traditional media.Shaikh was approached for comment.