No partnership with Assad (and no scrutiny till summer’s up)

Philip Hammond this afternoon ruled out Britain working with President Assad in the fight against Isis, arguing that simply being aligned against a common enemy ‘doesn’t make us friends with someone’. It is nearly a year since the Commons rejected intervention in Syria against the Assad regime, and now figures such as Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Lord Dannatt are arguing that there may need to be some kind of alliance against the Syrian leader in order to defeat Isis. But the Foreign Secretary said:

‘We may very well find that we are aligned against a common enemy, but that doesn’t make us friends with someone It doesn’t make us able to trust them, it doesn’t enable us to work with them. It would poison what we are trying to achieve in separating moderate Sunni opinion from the poisonous ideology of IS if we were to align ourselves with President Assad.

‘We may very well find that we’re fighting on some occasions the same people that he is, but that doesn’t make us his ally.