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The tragedy of Anne Boleyn’s childhood home
Hever Castle was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn and played a not insignificant part in the Henry VIII story. The smitten despot, already planning his divorce from sonless Catherine of Aragon, would ride over from his hunting lodge at nearby Penshurst Place to woo Anne there. Then, when things didn’t work out as he’d hoped, Henry seized Hever from her family and gave it to wife number four, Anne of Cleves, as part of the settlement when he was divorcing rather than beheading her, as he had poor Anne Boleyn.
The first thing that I heard when I arrived in a teeming car park was the voice of Mariah Carey singing: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’
It remains one of Britain’s best-preserved Tudor houses. Just last year historians discovered, lurking in a corner of the library, the actual book held by Thomas Cromwell in his celebrated portrait by Hans Holbein. So, finding myself on a recent wintry afternoon in the same corner of Kent with free time, and gripped by the second series of Wolf Hall, The Mirror and the Light, Hever seemed an obvious place to head.
I was imagining Hever with crepuscular rooms, candlelight reflecting off those Holbein canvases and dark wood walls, perhaps some choral music by Thomas Tallis or William Byrd to soften otherwise monastic silence. Instead, the first thing that I heard when I arrived in a teeming car park was the voice of Mariah Carey singing: ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ And as I looked towards the castle, I saw that its walls were illuminated by giant spotlights whose colours shifted every few seconds across a lurid palette: pink, magenta, sapphire.
Outside were fairground rides. Would there be some bouncy castle next to the real thing? Quite possibly, it seemed. It was a festival of tat, more Winter Wonderland than Tudor tower. While taking all this in, I rummaged in my wallet for my English Heritage and National Trust membership cards, assuming Hever would be run by one or other, only to discover that it’s neither – and entry was a poky £26 each.
This was the final straw. I decided to keep my money and take our dogs for a walk in the grounds instead, soon finding a means to bunk in while my wife entered the house alone. My decision to abstain was vindicated: ‘It’s even worse inside,’ she messaged me. ‘There are the horrible lights there too and hammy actors in crappy costumes. And more shrill music. It’s awful.’
This sort of thing seems to be a contagion that has spread from those dreadful ‘traditional’ Christmas markets – all Cuprinol-hued sheds selling £8 plastic cups of over-sweet mulled wine. These now take over many of our towns each winter, even historic ones such as Winchester or York, but this was the first time I had seen this syndrome manifest somewhere quite as august as Hever.
It is, though, the second time that my attempt to indulge my fondness for Wolf Hall has led to disappointment: in the week of Hilary Mantel’s death a couple of years ago, we went for a Thames-side walk past Hampton Court – only to find the whole river frontage outside Henry’s best-known residence was covered in plastic safety barriers, something I mentioned here.
The National Trust seems particularly keen to tell us of the evils of many of the houses in their care – while replacing the butter in its scones with margarine to make them vegan friendly. But even these cultural warriors would surely baulk at Mariah Carey. While English Heritage’s idea of aggressive populism is asking children to identify different tree leaves on a chart – positively quaint. But privately-owned Hever clearly feels under no such constraints.
Hever was bought by American tycoon William Waldorf Astor in 1903 as a home, which it remained for 80 years before it was acquired by its current owners, Broadland Properties, who turned it into a tourist attraction. Last year the family-owned company made £15 million. With such healthy profits, I can’t see Broadland giving two hoots about my misgivings over their management of Hever.
But were I king for a day – a slightly trimmer and more virile version of Henry, let’s say – I’d compulsorily purchase offenders like Hever from the public purse and restore a more sober atmosphere. I feel certain my subjects would approve.
Assad’s demise, Isis’s rise?
The Iranian-dominated Shia arc has collapsed. The keystone to the arc was Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the partnership that his father Hafiz al-Assad forged with the Iranian regime in the 1980s.
That alliance gave Tehran for decades its only state-level Arab ally, one that shares a border with Israel.
It was also critical in enabling supply of Hezbollah and providing forward bases and freedom of movement for Islamic Revolutionary Guard personnel. In return Assad’s Syria gained strategic depth in the form of an Islamic partner and patron.
The survival of Assad’s Syria was a point of strategic convergence between Russia and Tehran. That triangular relationship proved invaluable in 2015. It was the the IRGC-QF Commander Qasim Soleimani who tipped Russia into saving Assad.
But Iran may no longer be the key player in the region. With the disappearance of Assad, any hope Tehran may have had of reviving Hezbollah, battered by Israel to the point of no longer being a strategic asset, all but disappears.
What Hezbollah now becomes within Lebanon is an open and worrying question. But what Hezbollah isn’t any longer is a credible military force at the head of an Axis of Resistance.
Between them, Hai’at Tahrir Al Shams (HTS) and the Israel Defence Force (IDF), two deeply opposing forces, have blunted Hezbollah’s military capability and cut their supply lines.
For good measure, the US brokered cease-fire deal pushes Hezbollah back from their front line with Israel and leaves the IDF free to attack them inside Lebanon. They cannot now act effectively beyond their own borders.
Assad’s fall also deals a heavy blow to the credibility of Russia as an actor in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Arab World.
Putin was prepared, reluctantly, to bear considerable costs in order to save Asad in 2015. Now, with the loss of the naval and air bases which were its reward, Russia militarily ceases to be a presence in the region.
The eviction of Russian and Iranian influence from any country might ordinarily represent an opportunity for others.
But the HTS leader, Ahmed Hussain Al Shar’a, whose adopted name of Abu Mohamed al-Jolani reflects that his family are from the Golan heights, has posed the international community a problem if not a warning in his consistent positioning as a Syrian nationalist and therefore opposed to foreign intervention. His message will find resonance among Syrians for whom the expulsion of the French mandate forces in 1946 was a formative event and a national holiday (Id Al Jela’).
But Syria’s modern history has been dominated by foreign powers seeking influence over either the Assad regime, minorities or militias.
Jolani has been careful to temper his revolutionary zeal by calling for no revenge, no damage to state institutions, the protection of senior officials and even no celebratory firing into the air.
While the last may be unenforceable for a victorious army, the others will be a reasonable indication of his intent and sincerity.
So too will be his ability to construct a functioning coalition with other opposition groups, in particular the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the East which incorporate other Christian minorities and has been the sworn enemy of Isis.
He must also accommodate the emboldened opposition groups in the South and the proliferation of small groups with local agendas which have been caught up in the momentum of HTS’ advance. Among them, as the jails are emptied, will be many who are reluctant to lay down their weapon.
The large number of Isis members still in Syria will seek to pursue an agenda more extreme than that of HTS. The fate of Isis foreign fighters held in Syrian camps will be of acute concern to western governments, especially the UK.
At its worst, Syria could slide into the violent factionalism of Iraq or Libya. Much will depend on whether external actors intervene to promote their interests. With Iran and Russia evicted, the Gulf cautious and the US about to inaugurate a President opposed to armed intervention overseas, there will be fewer foreign powers intervening to fuel armed factionalism.
The early signs from Trump are that Syria isn’t on his to-do list
Turkey alone may see feel an imperative to intervene. While apparently having no influence over HTS (they claim they had no notice let alone being party to the planning of the latest advances) they have hard-core strategic interests, and an effective protectorate, in the North. They can be expected to take any opportunity further to weaken their enemy in Kurdistan, the PKK.
It remains to be seen whether HTS will stick to its nationalist agenda or be drawn into wider conflict in particular support for Hamas.
It may find its domestic agenda leaves no capacity for foreign adventures but revolutions create their own dynamic.
The early Iranian revolutionary state took a strategic decision to defend itself by exporting its revolution, which created the regional influence it has just lost.
HTS has a leader who is a proscribed terrorist. But Jolani also has credibility as a nationalist and now the prestige of being a successful leader of an armed rebellion. His agenda is, for now, one behind which Syrians, drained by the oppression of Assad and a decade of civil war, can unite.
Whether al-Jolani has the skills and the appetite to play the statesman or chooses to remain the Islamic revolutionary will determine the shape of the new Syrian state. It’s his choice.
If Jolani’s Syria fails and collapses into war-lordism it will be a further regional catastrophe. But if Jolani’s Syria succeeds it will be a problem. An austere Islamist state on the shores of the Mediterranean, led by former members of an Al-Qaeda affiliate, sympathetic to Hamas, and sharing a border with Israel was not in any state’s plan, least of all Israel’s. Trump and Netanyahu may consider it intolerable. But America and Israel may wait to see whether it turns its revolutionary zeal on them before putting it on their target list.
The early signs from Trump are that Syria isn’t on his to-do list. THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,’ said Trump on social media yesterday. ‘LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!’
HTS have reminded the international community of an important phenomenon. Non-state armed groups tend to have strategic patience. Unlike external actors who move on, they have nowhere else to go.
Isis from whom Jolani split over their terrorist agenda, should not be forgotten. In these fluid times preventing the Islamic Stage resurging might prove an early, common cause between Jolani and a range of sceptical and nervous powers who, for the moment, will be willing him to be better than Assad.
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The SNP budget was one big letdown
Shona Robison’s big fiscal announcement this week should have been the Scottish government’s plans to mitigate the deeply unpopular winter fuel payment cut imposed by UK Labour. The nationalists went early on revealing the scheme, however, doing so a week before the budget after being pushed by some smart manoeuvring from Scottish Labour.
Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader, had stated he would mitigate the winter fuel payment cut should he become First Minister in Holyrood’s 2026 elections. This position puts him in opposition to his Westminster boss, but Sarwar needs to demonstrate to Scottish voters he can use devolution to prioritise Scottish interests, no matter what Keir Starmer might be up to. Labour then tabled two amendments to the draft legislation needed to allow Scotland’s benefits agency, Social Security Scotland, to administer the payment.
Anyone stopping to look closely at these amendments might note the changes would make the payment more expensive and more complicated to administer. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to force the nationalists to act on keeping Scots pensioners warm in winter or to be condemned for their inaction – so they acted. You could sense the fag-packet urgency of the thing by its details. Scottish Labour had been pushing the SNP to spend a £41 million funding pot from Westminster on mitigating the winter fuel payment this year.
But it isn’t merely a case of handing out cash. Legislation has to be drafted and approved to allow it; systems put in place to pay it out. Instead, the £41 million was split into parts: £20 million each for a warm homes scheme and the Scottish Welfare Fund, then £1m for, er, social landlords to help residents sustain their tenancies.
‘Not sure how that helps exactly,’ an SNP insider said. Other than that it simply makes the numbers add up. Behind the scenes, it was ‘pure The Thick of It’ another insider told me. You can imagine the Malcolm Tucker-esque screaming for ideas. Make an announcement, any announcement, as long as it totals £41 million.
With the would-be centrepiece of this week’s budget announcement gone, what else might be up the finance secretary’s sleeve? To the surprise of many, Robison revealed her government would also mitigate the two-child benefit cap. The Conservative policy of limiting families to benefit entitlement for only their first two children has been a politically toxic one in Scotland. Polling shows a majority of Scots support the two-child cap, but the SNP has campaigned long and hard to end it. They have used the cap, and the associated ‘rape clause’ to call the Tories cruel and out of touch.
The nationalists then revived their campaigning during the general election to call for Labour to end the cap, attempting to frame Keir Starmer as a man unbothered by the plight of impoverished children. While that clearly had little impact for the UK party, it was a stick with which to beat Scottish Labour.
The media coverage was exactly as the SNP had hoped it to be – they were abolishing the two-child cap and bringing the political fight to Labour. The SNP has performed a neat trick here: they have no clear plan to mitigate the cap. Rather, they have a plan to find a plan to mitigate the cap. The budget spending pledge is for £3 million to ‘develop the systems’ to be used to award the benefit. By the time they do that, they may no longer be in power.
John Swinney has previously stated that the Scottish government has no power to mitigate the two-child cap. Now, suddenly, it does. If it was possible all along for the SNP to move sooner, then it is impossible to defend the allegation that the party allowed families to suffer for longer than was necessary for nothing but the sake of political point scoring.
Regardless, Sarwar is now above a trap door on the SNP’s stage. Labour is vanishingly unlikely to support the SNP’s budget and will have to vote down a budget that will feed hungry children. The SNP will say it is stopping Labour from freezing Scotland’s pensioners and starving its children. Labour will point to the fact that the SNP can only do this because of additional funding presented to Scotland this year by the Chancellor.
So far, so predictable. What’s interesting is the urgency behind the scenes to move on these two policy pledges. They were last minute and they were rushed.
Yet what does this urgency say? During Labour’s sweep to power, Anas Sarwar had a spring in his step. The narrative north of the border was that his party would be propelled to power in 2026 and he was already styling himself as Scotland’s new First Minister.
The SNP, under the no-nonsense pairing of John Swinney and his deputy Kate Forbes, has clearly decided it is not going to allow Sarwar into Bute House without a fight. They have moved steadily away from the culture wars obsession of the last administration and are focusing on tangible issues voters care about.
These two fiscal counter-attacks from Swinney’s government show his steel and determination
These manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres show the run up to 2026 is going to be more interesting than first thought – but the SNP will need more than mere tricks to see off Labour’s challenge.
Sunday shows: Rayner ‘welcomes’ fall of Assad
Deputy PM ‘welcomes the news’ that the Assad regime has fallen
Rebel forces in Syria have captured Damascus, and Bashar al-Assad has reportedly fled the capital, ending a regime that begin in 2000. On Sky News this morning, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told Trevor Phillips she ‘welcomes that news’, but stressed that a political resolution is needed that protects civilian lives and infrastructure. Rayner said a plan had been in place to make sure any UK citizens were evacuated from Syria ahead of the weekend’s developments.
Priti Patel: ‘The Turkish footprint is relevant here’
Trevor Phillips also asked Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel about Syria, and the wider implications for the region. Patel said there was no question that Turkey has ‘equities’ in the situation, and would be an influential voice, although she wouldn’t speculate on whether Turkey knew in advance about the rebel push. Patel said it was clear that Russia had been ‘consumed with Ukraine’ and had scaled back their presence in Syria. She also stressed that the UK and its allies had to deal with the ‘longstanding issue of Iran’ and its proxies in the region.
Angela Rayner: ‘We are determined… to deliver the housing we desperately need’
The deputy prime minister also spoke about Labour’s plans to build 1.5 million more homes by 2029. On the BBC, Rayner admitted that the government’s plans are a ‘stretch target’ which would require a scale of house building not seen since the 1950s, but she said she is determined to deliver the changes needed to make that goal possible. One of Labour’s proposed changes is to reduce the power that local councils have to block planning applications. Laura Kuenssberg asked Rayner why she thought the government ‘knows better’ than local authorities. Rayner said that mandatory local plans for housing construction would mean local authorities can decide themselves where development should take place, and that combined with the national planning policy framework would mean housing construction doesn’t get ‘stuck in the system for years’.
Shadow Treasury Minister: ‘Labour seem to be saying… local people can be ignored’
Shadow Treasury Minister Richard Fuller told Laura Kuenssberg that the Conservatives were building houses at a rate of 1.2 million houses (if continued for a five year term) in their final year in power, and suggested that Labour’s target of 1.5 million was ‘reasonable’. However, he claimed Labour were ignoring local people, and that it was important that public services were improved in line with additional housing. Fuller did not say the Conservatives would refuse to back Labour’s plans, and suggested it was good news that Labour were looking into deregulation.
Emma Pinchbeck: ‘We have rarely talked about… the costs of not tackling climate change’
This weekend Storm Darragh killed two people and left thousands without power across the country. Speaking to Laura Kuenssberg, Climate Change Committee CEO Emma Pinchbeck said the country had to prepare for the worsening effects of climate change, including flood defences and preparing cities for extreme heat. Kuenssberg asked if the country should be spending more on these protections, and Pinchbeck claimed that there isn’t enough discussion about the costs of not tackling climate change. Pinchbeck called for more resources to help advise the government on how to prepare the economy for the impact of climate change.
Putin’s Middle Eastern house of cards
The Kremlin’s involvement in Syria’s civil war was always, first and foremost, about posing as a great multi-regional power rather than actually being one. Vladimir Putin’s deployment of a single squadron of warplanes to Hmemim airbase in Syria in 2015 brought a gun to a knife-fight. The Assad regime had been fighting insurgents with poison gas and infamous ‘barrel bombs’ rolled out of helicopters. Russian Su-24 and Su-35 fighter-bombers and Kamov helicopter gunships were quickly able to turn the tide against the growing rebellion and undoubtedly saved Bashir al-Assad’s regime. Unlike America’s multi-trillion dollar investment in Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin was able to change the fate of a nation by sending just 30 aircraft and deploying just 2,300 personnel on the ground – plus a few hundred Wagner mercenaries.
Putin’s intervention in 2015 allowed him to play the Middle Eastern power broker, just as his Soviet predecessors had done – except without the expense and effort of spending billions of rubles on military aid, building dams, universities and schools as the USSR had done for decades across the region. At the time the Kremlin was newly isolated in the wake of Russia’s snap annexation of Crimea in February 2014. The Syria gambit was Putin’s answer to those western leaders – led by the Obama White House – who sought to contain, downplay and ignore Russia. As the saviour and supporter of the Assad regime, Putin has to be reckoned with and respected as a player in the region alongside Iran, Israel and Turkey.
The Kremlin marked its victory over Syria’s jihadists with a spectacular piece of political theatre. On 5 May 2016, Russia’s leading conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Symphony Orchestra were flown from St Petersburg to perform pieces by Bach, Prokofiev and Shchedrin at the Roman Theatre in the ancient ruins of Palmyra. An audience of Russian soldiers, government ministers and journalists sat where a year before Isis had filmed the public execution of its enemies – including the beheading of Palmyra’s Director of Antiquities Khaled al-Asaad. It was a brilliant set-piece of propaganda illustrating the triumph of western civilisation over Islamist obscurantism and violence – though Assad regime forces, assisted by Russian GRU military intelligence, wrought bloody revenge on Isis members wherever they found them, especially those originally from Russia.
Yet Syria never became a great patriotic project for Putin’s Kremlin. Russia’s airbase in Hmemim and a tiny naval base at Tartus, near Latakia, were always of more symbolic and diplomatic value than practical. Tartus, for instance, was notionally the forward operating headquarters of Russia’s grandly-entitled Mediterranean Sea Task Force. Yet (as a quick glance at Google Maps will reveal) the main wharf at Tartus is just a hundred meters long, and not long or deep enough for the larger ships of Mediterranean Sea Task Force – such as the missile frigate Admiral Grigorovich – to actually dock there. Furthermore since the beginning of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the Russian fleet at Tartus has effectively been cut off from its closest home base of Sevastopol in the Black Sea under the terms of the Montreux Convention, which bars passage of warships though the Bosporus Straits in wartime (unless returning to base). Thus in practice, all Russian ships using Tartus would have to sail all the way from the Baltic or the Arctic. And in any case earlier this week all Russian warships and auxiliaries left Tartus and Russian personnel and aircraft have been evacuated from Hmemim, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
Russian state TV has, so far, downplayed the dramatic collapse of the Kremlin’s sole Middle Eastern protege. Foreign Minister Lavrov called for ‘dialogue’ with the opposition. ‘The fall of Assad is tragic event’, tweeted ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. ‘He was ally of Russia and the axis of Resistance. We have to accept the blow… This is the fight, the war. But we should never give up. We will win.’
The fall of Assad is, doubtless, a blow to Putin’s prestige. But the swiftness of the regime’s collapse, the fact that Russian forces on the ground reportedly did so little to resist the rebel advance, and the fact that Moscow has already offered asylum to several members of the Assad family and possibly to the fallen President himself, suggests that the Kremlin was willing to sacrifice Assad for the sake of bigger diplomatic games.
Russia’s relationship with Turkey, the major supporter of the victorious HTS rebels in Syria and the big geopolitical winner of regime change in Damascus, has always been far more important for the Kremlin than anything the Assad regime can offer. Turkey is a vital customer of Russian natural gas and an indirect exporter to southern Europe. It’s a major sanctions-busting hub for commerce and passenger transit. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remained effectively neutral in the Ukraine war and played a key role in brokering attempted peace talks in 2022, and a grain export corridor in the Black Sea for Ukraine which also allowed Russian grain to flow freely. Erdogan is also likely to resume his role as honest broker in future peace talks in 2025.
In return for this economic and diplomatic support, the Kremlin has been all too willing to betray its smaller allies to please Ankara. Earlier this year Russian peacemakers stood aside as Turkish ally Azerbaijan rolled into and ethnically cleansed the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. And now Russia has helped ensure that rather than being protracted and bloody, the end of its ally Assad was swift and relatively painless.
With its Syrian bases gone, Russia will now face difficulties in projecting power in Libya, the Central African Republic and other countries where its semiofficial mercenary forces are deployed. But on the other hand the cruise missiles of the Tartus fleet and the aircraft of the Hmemim base will now be freed for deployment in Ukraine.
For nine years, Putin successfully cosplayed a leader able to project power across continents. But in Syria that power has proved fragile as a house of cards – and Putin’s word, lest anyone doubted it, utterly fickle.
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This is Iran’s annus horribilis
Iran’s Axis of Resistance is falling apart. Israel has significantly degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities and decapitated its leadership. Hamas has been left decimated in Gaza. The regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. Intact for now are the Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Such a situation is not only a product of geopolitical trends but also an indictment of the leadership of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force. This will necessitate a reorienting of Iranian strategy.
2024 has been Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s annus horribilis. Tehran began this year in a stronger regional position, with Israel seemingly entrapped in an endless conflict with Hamas in Gaza leading to its growing international isolation and Iran’s increasing integration. But then events took a turn for the worse for Khamenei beginning in January, when Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy political leader for Hamas and a key interlocutor with Tehran, was killed by Israel. In March, Israel assassinated the Commander of the IRGC Quds Force’s Department 2000, which led its Levant operations, Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his senior deputies in Syria. This gutted the IRGC of institutional memory, networks, and experience in a critical theater for Tehran. Zahedi’s successor Abbas Nilforoushan was killed months later.
Then came May, when President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, who was an important diplomatic liaison with the Axis of Resistance and once known as a representative of the late Qassem Soleimani, died in a helicopter crash. That scrambled succession plans for the supreme leader as Raisi was thought to be a leading contender. In July, Israel eliminated Hamas’s political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guesthouse, embarrassing Khamenei. Fast forward to the autumn, when the Jewish state launched a series of devastating operations against Hezbollah, killing its leadership, including Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, his successor Hashem Safieddine, many members of its Jihad Council who were wanted by the international community for decades over terrorism, and longtime senior operatives who were the glue within the broader Axis of Resistance. Nasrallah himself was so influential as a strategist for Tehran that there was speculation that he could even succeed Khamenei as supreme leader.
This is not to mention two Israeli retaliatory attacks on Iranian soil that destroyed air defence systems, leaving its homeland vulnerable to attacks and created bottlenecks in its missile production lines. This has exposed Iran and eroded its deterrence.
Iran’s national security strategy has been unravelling in real time. For years, the proxy network of the IRGC has been a crown jewel in its arsenal, alongside its missile and drone program and nuclear capabilities. As then-Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani proclaimed in 2019, ‘over the past four decades, internal stability, national defence capability, strategic depth, and progresses in new and nuclear technologies have increased Iran’s role and influence in regional and global equations.’ But today, Iran’s internal stability is no longer a given after a series of protests, most recently after the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022; the national defence capability has been dented after Israel’s strike on 26 October on sensitive military sites; and its strategic depth is crumbling with the losses in its proxy network, leaving only its nuclear program which is advancing.
Already, Iranian officials have been expressing fears that the advances of anti-Assad forces are part of a larger plot to weaken Iran. They see a through line from the losses by Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon to the evaporation of the Assad regime in Syria. Ultimately, Iranian decision-shapers fear that next Hezbollah will be even more exposed, their holdings in Iraq and Yemen will collapse, which will then ultimately pose a threat to the Islamic Republic’s grip on power in Tehran. As Mehdi Taeb, a cleric who is head of the Ammar Headquarters, a think tank that is close with the supreme leader, once said at the height of the Syrian Civil War a decade ago, ‘if we keep Syria, we can get Khuzestan back too, but if we lose Syria, we cannot keep Tehran’.
Therefore, this is an earthquake for Iran, given how much it has invested in Syria over years. Some estimates suggest that it provided around $11 billion worth of oil alone to Syria from 2012-21. Leaked documents reveal a total debt owned by Assad to Tehran to be around $50 billion and counting. Other assessments, including by Syria expert Steven Heydemann, in 2015 put the total Iranian support between $15 billion to $20 billion annually. Investments of this nature reflected Assad’s role as a guarantor of a logistics and supply corridor for Hezbollah.
Iran has long been Syria’s closest ally
Iran has long been Syria’s closest ally. The relationship between Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, and Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, began even before the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Hafez al-Assad as president of Syria reportedly offered Khomeini refuge in Syria after he left Iraq. Post-revolution, Assad was the first Arab leader to recognise Khomeini’s government, sent him a gold illuminated Koran, and was the lone supporter in the Arab world of Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. Damascus also historically provided a platform for Hezbollah operations. In September 1983, the U.S. government intercepted messages from Iran’s Intelligence Ministry instructing the Iranian ambassador to Syria to order ‘spectacular action against the United States Marines’ in Lebanon. A declassified U.S. intelligence assessment noted ‘Syria may have provided some logistic support to Tehran in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait in December 1983’.
The first trip Ali Khamenei made when he was president was to Damascus to visit with Hafez Al-Assad in September 1984. This was one the few international visits Khamenei made when he was president and since he became supreme leader in 1989, he has never left Iran. In fact, Khamenei’s trip, which took place on 6 September, came weeks before the bombing of the US Embassy Annex in Beirut on 20 September, leading to suspicions of Iranian complicity.
But strains have existed in the relationship between Tehran and Damascus despite the warm ties and mutual support over the years. A Special US National Intelligence Estimate from April 1985 noted that differences between Syria and Iran centred over Lebanon, especially given the Assad regime’s openness at the time to ‘reaching limited tactical accommodations with Israel or restoring a balance in Lebanese confessional relationships’. In 1986, during an armed conflict between Amal and Hezbollah, Syria and Iran found themselves on opposite sides, with Assad supporting Amal and Iran backing Hezbollah. Years later in 2021, the IRGC’s commander in Syria Javad Ghaffouri was reportedly ousted from Syria over a ‘violation of Syrian sovereignty’.
Soleimani birthed and expanded the Axis of Resistance, and his successor Esmail Ghaani coordinated it following the 7 October massacre by Hamas in Israel. Throughout 2023, it appeared to be working, with coordination reaching unprecedented levels across the axis – with attacks coming from Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Iran even felt comfortable enough to launch its own direct strike against Israel twice. But Iranian leaders have overplayed their hand, leaving the regime dangerously overconfident, overextended, outgunned, and suffering from severe intelligence failures. The New York Times reported on an internal memorandum from the IRGC which suggested surprise over Syria as ‘unbelievable and strange’. A former Quds Force operative Mohammad Reza Gholamreza lamented this month that Turkey provided Iran reassurances that no operation was planned. This has resulted in the disintegration of chunks of the Axis of Resistance. The deaths of a significant chunk of the IRGC brain trust in the Levant over 2024 has only aggravated this situation. As Assad’s regime was sagging and along with it the infrastructure that Soleimani built, his successor Ghaani was pictured at a mourning ceremony in Tehran removed from the destruction.
However, despite the unprecedented defeats, it would be unwise to underestimate Iranian willpower to rebuild and protect its interests. Over the years, Iran’s leadership has made common cause and partnerships with not only Shiite militias but also Sunni extremists. This can be seen with Hamas, its harbouring of Al-Qaeda on Iranian soil, and its resourcing of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has been a historic foe. Iran almost went to war with the Taliban in 1998 over the killing of Iranian diplomats. But years later, intelligence assessments surfaced that Iran offered bounties to Taliban fighters to kill US forces in Afghanistan. The Shiite presence in Syria will also continue to be a recruitment pool for Tehran. The Quds Force still retains roughly 5,000 officers, not to mention the IRGC’s other subunits which remain on the scene. Tehran may seek flexible partnerships with such Sunni actors to protect its interests as much as it can.
Thus, Iran’s grand strategy of seeking to eradicate the State of Israel and push the United States out of the region is unlikely to fundamentally change. But the regime’s strategic depth will be constrained and the means in which it achieves those ends – via its proxy network of partnerships – will have to shift.
The recent events are likely disorienting for Khamenei. At the age of 85 and planning for his succession, the Assad regime in Syria has been at Tehran’s side since 1979, for the totality of his presidency and much of his supreme leadership. Coupled with Hassan Nasrallah’s demise, this is likely to shake the regime, with voices in the political elite already questioning why Tehran has invested so much in Syria only to be left with colossal debts. Assad’s fall could also accelerate a debate within Tehran over whether to develop nuclear weapons, empowering the growing chorus of voices advocating for a change in the Iranian nuclear doctrine to protect the regime. There will be others in Iran who will likely instead counsel negotiations to buy the Islamic Republic time and space as a means of survival.
In the end, Iran faces losses that are unprecedented since the Iran-Iraq War and will have to contend with a new American president who is unpredictable and slated to employ maximum pressure against Iran. With this dynamic, will come a reckoning and a forced reconsideration of its strategy. Tehran may be weakened but is still dangerous.
Syria is up for grabs
After 13 years of war that began with street protests during the heady days of the Arab Spring and morphed into one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the Middle East’s recent history, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, collapsed in just over a week.
Sunni rebels – some of them former jihadists – who had broken out of the north-west province of Idlib swept into the capital Damascus after overrunning the major cities of Aleppo, Homs and Hama on their way south.
On the road into the city witnesses described seeing uniforms, military equipment and even tanks abandoned by the Syrian Army. On the country’s borders, queues began forming of displaced families desperate to return home after more than a decade as refugees.
In Damascus’s Umayyad Square, young men clambered onto tanks, shot in the air with automatic weapons, danced and took selfies. Many spoke of a moment of hope.
At Sednaya prison, one of the world’s most notorious penitentiaries where up to 30,000 inmates were reportedly tortured and killed, the cells were opened amid emotional scenes.
The unexpected fall of the Assad dynasty, which has ruled Syria since 1971, marks a seismic shift in the power politics of a region that is already aflame as well as a major setback for Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s principal backers.
The rebel takeover of the country is also perhaps the most significant result so far of Israel’s taking a sledgehammer to the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East, in a bid to establish itself as the regional strongman.
Assad’s regime was on the brink of collapse in 2015 after opposition activists and rebel groups seized control of large swathes of the country. But it was saved by the intervention of Russian air power and Iran’s sending in thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, it’s proxy in Lebanon.
Now, however, Russia is stretched to breaking point on the plains of eastern Europe as President Vladimir Putin seeks to overwhelm Ukraine, and was unwilling to commit more resources to protecting Assad.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, has seen its fighting capacity gutted in its war with Israel which has killed much of its leadership. There were reports yesterday that several Hezbollah armoured vehicles had set off from Lebanon to bolster the Syrian regime only to be destroyed by Israeli air strikes.
Iran, the major Shia power in the region, is also on the back foot, with its economy teetering and its decades-long effort to build a regional axis of resistance to counter the power of Israel and Saudi Arabia in tatters.
With control of Syria now up for grabs, some analysts are comparing the significance of the fall of Damascus to the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran, brought the Mullahs to power and set the scene for half a century of bloody power struggle in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Syria now is at a crossroads. It could head down the path to turmoil and blood-letting as happened after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
But there is also hope that, having already endured such a brutal civil war, and with the old regime being swept from power with so little blood spilled, the various rebel factions will manage to unite to form a national unity government.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, spent years burnishing its credentials as the government of Idlib, a north-western Syrian province that is home to 3 to 4 million Sunni Muslims, mostly refugees, who lived beyond the writ of Damascus.
There is fear that these Sunni militants – whose forebearers spawned a decade of violent international jihad and the horrors of al-Qa’eda and isis – will impose a hardline Islamist state that will persecute Shia, Christians and other religious minorities.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, however, the leader of HTS, has been at pains to stress that he intends to rule as a leader of all Syrians. When the rebels swept into Aleppo this past week he reassured residents that he would not be imposing Islamic strictures or banning worship by religious minorities.
In the capital Damascus yesterday HTS fighters and rebels from other groups were guarding government buildings, a far cry from the debacle that ensued after US soldiers reached Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Most Syrians, exhausted and demoralised after years of conflict, seemed at least ready to give HTS a chance.
Residents were out on the streets of several cities celebrating the demise of Assad. While some fighters shot in the air others joined arms and danced in the streets.
There was no early word yesterday of the fate of Bashar al-Assad although Moscow issued a statement saying he had left the country after negotiations with ‘other factions’. It said it did not know where he had gone.
Many of Assad’s close associates will probably have fled to a strip of land on the coast which is the heartland of the country’s Alawite community, from which Assad hailed.
It is also home to a major Russian air base in Latakia and Moscow’s only warm-water naval facility at Tartus from where it projects power into the Mediterranean and beyond.
Last week Moscow launched bombing raids against rebel targets, including against hospitals, in a response that did little to alter realities on the ground. But it has now indicated it is willing to negotiate with the leading rebel factions that are Syria’s new leaders.
Turkey will likely have an even big say in the future of Syria and could emerge as the major regional beneficiary of Assad’s fall. Of six million refugees forced out of Syria by the war, nearly four million currently live in Turkey.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressured Assad for months to negotiate a power-sharing deal with the rebels that might have allowed many of the refugees to return from Turkey.
But Assad, a cruel and uncompromising despot even by the standards of his benighted region, had refused. Ankara finally seems to have run out of patience with Damascus and given the green light for the rebel advance.
As for Syria’s future much will now depend on the role of other powers in the region. Israel will be pleased to see such a staunch ally of Iran and Hezbollah fall, but wary of a resurgence of Sunni fundamentalism.
Turkey will be looking for a greater role in the north of the country where it is in a decades-old fight with Kurdish guerrillas, and the Gulf states, which had begun to rehabilitate Assad, will also be jockeying for position.
Yesterday the Syrian prime minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, who is still nominally in control of the country, called for early elections. But others warned that after half a century of despotic rule and with 300,000 dead and half a million injured in the war, slowly rebuilding state institutions was more important than an early vote.
In the US meanwhile, the Biden administration said that it would not be intervening to support either side in the conflict.
Donald Trump, who will take the reins of power on 20 January, wrote on social media: ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!’
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How Assad fell
The astonishing and abrupt fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus is a moment of historic importance for the Middle East, in which the shifting of tectonic plates can be plainly felt. But which plates in particular? And what are the immediate implications?
Firstly, it is important just to contemplate the dimensions of what has just taken place. The Assad regime’s beginning is usually dated to 1970. In that year Hafez Assad, father of the now deposed Bashar, launched a coup to topple his former ally, Salah Jadid, and proclaimed himself president. His family then ruled Syria, uninterruptedly, until this week. But it’s worth remembering that the Ba’ath party, through which both Assad and his predecessor emerged, had ruled Syria since 1963. So the fall of Bashar represents the end of 61 years of uninterrupted rule in Syria of this party.
The Assads of course long since emptied the structures and institutions of this party of any real role or content. Theirs was a family regime. The more meaningful broader foundation on which they rested was the support and cooptation of the Alawi community, from which the family hailed. The fall of the Assads represents the end of Alawi ascendancy in Syria, and the return of the domination of Syria’s Sunni Arab majority, from which the uprising emerged.
The end, when it came, was brief. A lightning dash by the Sunni Islamist Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) militia, down the spine of cities which fell like dominos in an astonishing ten days. First Aleppo, then Hama, Homs and finally Damascus. All with minimal resistance from the regime’s forces.
But while few if any Syria watchers predicted the speed with which the regime would fall, the decrepit and rotten nature of the Syrian government’s institutions under Bashar al-Assad had been apparent for some time.
Assad had survived the civil war launched against him in the period 2012-20 not because of the strength of his own forces, but because of the power and loyalty of his allies. Specifically, Russia and Iran stepped in to save him during those years. Within a year of the launch of the uprising, Bashar was on the ropes. The decision in 2013 of Iran to deploy its proxy militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan plugged the gap in loyal manpower that would almost certainly have led to Assad’s downfall at that time. His army was large on paper. But it consisted mainly of conscripted Sunni Arab Syrians. Much of it therefore couldn’t be relied upon for use against an insurgency raised from among those communities.
The Iran-supported militias, Hezbollah among them, were able to stem the rebel tide. Then in late 2015, Russian aircraft were deployed for the first time over the skies of Syria. They successfully stopped a rebel advance toward the western coast under way at that time, which would have threatened the Russian airbase at Khmemim, and the naval facilities at Tartus and Latakia.
Thanks to these interventions, the regime was able to roll up rebel areas of control over the following three years. By 2019, only one zone of insurgent control remained, in the north west. This area proved impervious to the regime’s ambitions, because of the presence of Turkish forces in the area, and the guarantee they offered.
As it now turns out, the Turkish President’s decision not to entirely abandon the remnants of the insurgency was a historic choice. It made possible the quiet incubation of HTS military strength in the subsequent years, and its eruption southwards this year.
Reporting in Syria in those years, I observed the feebleness of Assad’s forces up close, and took careful note of it. On the ground in Damascus in 2017, I saw the helplessness of the local police force when faced with the antics of armed Russians on the streets of Syria’s supposed capital, and the crucial role played by Iran-created militias in carrying out daily security tasks there. Damascus didn’t look like the capital of a regime that had successfully defeated an insurgency. Rather, it looked like a city under foreign occupation, with the empty shell of a local regime maintained for convenience’s sake.
In 2019, in the Tal Tamr area in Syria’s north east, my colleagues and I similarly observed close up and with astonishment the decrepit state of Assad’s line infantry battalions sent to help defend against an expected Turkish push southwards at that time. In the positions we visited, the troops lacked basic provisions and medical supplies, and begged for these from neighbouring Kurdish units.
So it was plain that Assad continued to ‘rule’ because of Iran and Russia. Which raises of course, the question: why didn’t they help him this time? Why haven’t we just witnessed a repeat of 2013, and 2015, in which Iranian proxy manpower and Russian aircraft intervene to stop the insurgent march southward?
The crucial difference between those years and what has just transpired is that none of the forces which had saved Assad in the past were able to help this time.
Russia is committed to the strategic quagmire of its war in Ukraine, which is consuming thousands of lives every month. There was nothing to spare for the long standing client on the Mediterranean.
Iran, meanwhile, is reeling from a serious of blows inflicted by Israel in the course of the last two months. Most significantly, Israel’s crippling of Hezbollah left Tehran bereft of its most powerful proxy instrument. Jerusalem’s counter attack on Iran itself on 26 October left Tehran without air defence and unable to continue or escalate the direct confrontation with Israel. Recent events in Iraq have revealed that Iran’s client militias too were keen to avoid any possible clash with Israel, following an oblique Israeli threat of possible direct retribution for the militias’ not very effectual efforts to launch drones and missiles at the Jewish state.
The upshot was that Iran’s proxy militia system, which mobilised and saved Assad in 2013, was unavailable a decade letter.
Without any help from his friends, Assad’s hollow regime rapidly dissolved. Its demise is testimony to the determination of the Sunni Islamist insurgents, HTS’s Abu Mohammed al-Jolani chief among them, and their backers in Ankara. But the absence of Assad’s allies, reflecting the current weakness and vulnerability of Iran, is the single most significant factor behind the dramatic events of recent days.
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Syria is emerging from a nightmare
Gradually, and then suddenly, the regime of Bashar al-Assad has collapsed. This century’s most evil tyrant has fled Syria, and Damascus has fallen to the opponents of the regime. Across the country, a new political reality reigns. In towns and cities across Syria, the regime’s torture chambers are being opened, and the prisons liberated.
Men whose adulthoods have been stolen from them by the tyrant are emerging into the fires of day. Brothers are being united after being separated for 40 years. They were separated when one was 18 and the other younger, because the elder of them fell foul of a regime patrol and was taken away for torture for the remainder of his natural life.
There is a mother who lost her son 15 years ago, because he was accused of daubing some anti-dictator graffiti, or not reciting the right words in school, or conspiring to run a radio station that did not sing the praises of the leader, or demonise his enemies, or was conducted in a banned language, or contained the wrong history, the unapproved history, the things you were not then permitted to say.
The petty criminals, denied a stake in the economy because of their race or faith or region of birth, imprisoned for so long their whole families have died of old age and grief. They’re coming out now, with nothing left to live for.
Into the depths of Syria’s prisons have disappeared more than one generation. The refugees one speaks to, the people still in the country’s north, all have a detainee they know: someone they pray for nightly, someone whose fate is not known, someone they hope against all logic is still alive and might soon be photographed leaving somewhat anti-climactically through a newly sprung prison door.
The prisons are hell on earth. They cannot be described in ordinary language. I could give you estimates of the numbers held and tortured. I could tell you of the hundreds of thousands starved, beaten, and maltreated to death. There are, of course, thanks to the efforts of the defector codenamed Caesar, photographs of thousands of emaciated bodies fresh from the torture chambers.
You still wouldn’t believe me.
A decade ago, this was already said to be the most documented mass-killing in world history. That is still the case.
One day, Syrians told me and each other, for over a decade, we will open up the dungeons of Sednaya, the prison of all prisons, the Lubyanka of our own country, and we will make of it a museum.
Guides will show people the cells that were once filled with bodies in various states of dying and decay. We will read, with melancholy signs attached to translate, the final messages scratched into walls with ripped fingernails.
Now Sednaya has been liberated.
Will it be enough?
Many have died who might have told of what happened to them. They cannot testify. But all of this was recorded. Ba’athist states, of which Syria was one, suffer from bureaucracy like some suffer with a chronic illness. For a decade, foreigners have been told that if the international courts and tribunals decide to turn their hands to Syria, they will have so much evidence to weigh and to adjudicate that the inevitable trials will be difficult to stage-manage.
So many killings, so much torture. So many hands visible in the issuing of the instructions. If any of them are alive and captured, the people at the top will be easy, even a delight, to prosecute. Their indictments, their condemnations, already fill warehouses.
But I will make a prediction. The regime has fallen and its jails are opened. If they are kept, and not burnt down by their liberated inmates, and, temporarily, teary-eyed reporters and their camera crews mill about in these prisons, and document it – and people see all this on their phones and shed hypocritical tears about man’s cruelty to man – we will still, very easily, forget all of this.
Polite society forgot it for a decade. Easily and energetically, they forgot it for a decade.
People live fantasy lives. They make up their reality. Evil is a hard problem. Better to pretend it doesn’t exist. There is no evidence that can convince ordinary people that evil has been done, if peace of mind requires that they disbelieve it.
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The BBC has a ‘talent’ problem
So here we are again – another well-known BBC presenter is facing a growing list of allegations of misconduct, tarnishing the image of the state broadcaster.
This time around it’s MasterChef presenter Greg Wallace. In the depressingly familiar pattern of previous scandals, we’ve learned that concerns had been raised repeatedly with the BBC, but no meaningful action had been taken against Wallace until the scandal broke.
My colleagues and I, working in the newsroom as the Wallace story broke, ended up once again reporting on the failings and double standards of my employer, and wondering why our overlords seem unable to learn from past mistakes.
It’s worth stressing here that the dismay of the public is shared by the journalists who do the real graft at the BBC – the tireless staffers who make sure running orders are filled and hammer at their keyboards 24/7, writing the scripts their highly-paid presenter colleagues read out to unwarranted acclaim.
I vividly recall a key figure on the news desk ranting with genuine outrage about what he saw as the obstruction and obfuscation of the BBC’s higher-ups and PR spinners over the Huw Edwards affair, a reputational disaster that should surely have prompted resignations from the corporation’s executive tier. Instead of a major managerial shake-up however, more damage has been done to the BBC’s standing again.
My theory on why this keeps happening is that the BBC has its own internal cult of celebrity that gives high-profile figures greater leeway to behave as they wish, rather than as they should. From what I have witnessed, senior managers seem bedazzled and fixated with the ‘talent’, much to the chagrin of the people who do the spade work behind the scenes.
I have lost count of the times I have sat through presentations given by editorial bosses who insist on namechecking well-known presenters and correspondents whilst failing to acknowledge the lower-rung journalists who made such ‘amazing work’ possible. (These grating pep talks usually conclude with a morale-sapping rundown of the latest round of job cuts, with the axe invariably falling well clear of senior management.)
This undervaluing of regular hacks and overvaluing of overpaid ‘talent’ has created an imbalance in corporate governance. I have written here before about two-tier editorial policy on certain issues at the BBC. What is also clear is that the broadcaster takes a two-tier approach to policing the conduct of its employees.
It’s easy to come by examples. Section 15.3.5 of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines concerns ‘Risks of Conflicts of Interest’ and enumerates four ‘principal areas of risk that may arise from an individual’s external interests and activities’.
One of these areas is ‘the risk of bringing the BBC into disrepute’. Another is ‘the risk of bringing the BBC’s impartiality into doubt’. I decided to put my two-tier theory to the test by contacting the BBC press office about the controversial social media activities of one of the broadcaster’s best-known presenters, Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine.
A cycling evangelist, Vine has for some time taken it upon himself to film motorists he deems to be dangerous as he rides through London. He then posts the footage for his 774,000 followers on X, with captions and dramatic sound effects. Unwitting drivers have been targeted and scolded by Vine, who acts as judge and jury in the videos.
A recent example shows Vine cycling through an amber light on his bike and nearly colliding with a bus. The footage zooms in on the face of the female bus driver, clearly identifying her as Vine intones gravely, ‘This is a very dangerous driver. That’s a bus driver who’s going to kill.’
Imagine how that woman might feel when she realises she has been publicly castigated with no right of reply (a basic tenet of journalism) by one of the BBC’s most high-profile presenters. What if she faced reprisals from Vine’s fellow cycling zealots or loses her job as a result?
You might think this kind of guerilla journalism clearly risks bring the BBC into disrepute. Yet a BBC spokesperson responded to my anonymised email with a curt: ‘Jeremy is aware of his duty under the BBC’s social media guidelines.’
Vine doesn’t limit himself to proselytising about road safety. In another post he writes: ‘I don’t know who cut down the Sycamore Gap tree, but if and when they are convicted, we need life sentences.’ In what world does this reflect impartiality? This case is currently going through the courts.
Another example of the two-tier approach taken by the BBC can be seen in the almost vertical career trajectory of the corporation’s disinformation specialist and BBC Verify star, Marianna Spring.
As first reported by the New European, Spring has been accused of embellishing her CV. But this has not stalled her meteoric rise. Following a path ingloriously blazed by Robert Peston (who during his stint at the Beeb was dubbed by newsroom wags the ‘ego-nomics editor’), Spring is one of the BBC’s new breed of celebrity reporters who are seemingly encouraged to put themselves at the heart of whatever story they’re covering. It doesn’t appear to have dawned on Spring or the BBC that this might be the answer to the question posed by her podcast title: Why Do You Hate Me?
The decision to ignore Spring’s CV has damaged BBC Verify’s credibility and has potentially made it impossible for the corporation’s own disinformation queen to pursue certain stories that fall within her remit. As Steerpike has noted, the BBC was initially strangely silent when the accuracy of Rachel Reeves’s CV first came under scrutiny in October. It doesn’t take a genius to work out why.
Only this week we learned Clive Myrie, the man BBC bosses hope could become the new Huw Edwards (but without the horrifying hinterland), has also blotted his copybook yet suffered no meaningful consequences.
It’s emerged Myrie failed to declare to the BBC at least £145,000 of earnings from engagements outside of the corporation. He’s said sorry and pledged not to take part in any more paid external events ‘in the foreseeable future, beyond a handful of pre-existing commitments.’ So that’s okay then. One might forgive Myrie for a side-hustle or two if he was paid peanuts, but the news anchor and Mastermind host took home at least £310,000 of licence payers’ money this year.
Although a universe away from some of the appalling scandals that have rocked the BBC in the past (the unspeakable Jimmy Savile revelations being the most notable), all of this demonstrates that no matter what the corporation claims, it continues to be lax in policing its stars.
And until this approach changes, you can be sure that it won’t be long before another top BBC name is making headlines again for all the wrong reasons.
The Russian nuclear threat is looming once more
It is 00.40 pm, 26 September 1983. Lieutenant-Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the duty commander in charge of monitoring the Soviet Union’s early warning satellites designed to identify American missile attacks, is carefully checking his panels. Suddenly, the alarms roar into loud action. The word ‘Launch’ flashes onto his screen in large red letters. For the next 15 seconds, one of the satellites reports that five American Minuteman missiles have been launched and are heading towards the Soviet Union.
Based in a secret bunker hidden deep beneath the woods just outside Moscow, Petrov is transfixed and stares at the screen in disbelief and shock. The automatic order to launch in retaliation is also sent to Soviet military commanders. But it is up to Petrov to verify whether the attack is genuine. He has seven minutes. That gives the Soviet president Yuri Andropov the time to order nuclear missiles to be fired against the United States in retaliation.
The similarity between today’s unease and 1983 does not stop at Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling
Surrounded by dozens of incredulous colleagues, Petrov desperately hopes it is a false alarm. He frantically runs all the technical checks, again and again. But to his horror, the data and multiple verifications confirm the US nuclear attack had been launched. Time is running out. The minutes and seconds tick by. Officially, he should press the button in front of him which sends a coded message to Andropov that the US had started world war three. Andropov, a former KGB chief and hardline Cold Warrior, had long believed America planned to destroy the Soviet Union with its nuclear arsenal. This warning validates his suspicions. If his officials confirm the attack, he would almost certainly authorise the retaliation and 150 million American lives would be lost.
Just over 40 years on, the West is once again engaged in a new Cold War with Russia where, thanks to Vladimir Putin’s sabre-rattling, the threat of the use of nuclear missiles is real. The stakes were raised last month when the Russian President approved a new policy which means if Russia is attacked by any country backed by a nuclear state, a nuclear response would be triggered. The Kremlin has also issued chilling nuclear warnings throughout the Ukraine war. ‘Russia could retaliate [to use of US ballistic missile strikes] with weapons of mass destruction against Kyiv and key Nato facilities, wherever they are located’, said Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s security council.
For Sir Richard Dearlove, former chief of MI6, Russia is already in a hybrid war with the west (fake news, hacking, assassination attempts, arson plots). ‘The Russians think they are in a state of war with the whole of Europe,’ he said last week. ‘It’s an actual war which is not a military conflict but a hybrid war with the Russians involved in sabotage against the West and so it is a very dangerous situation.’
Fortunately, in 1983, Petrov, the military commander on duty that night, hesitated to respond to the flashing signal of a nuclear attack. He used common sense. Why would the Americans attack with only five missiles, he thought. And surely the Soviet ground-based radars should have detected them as they flew over the horizon. He wasn’t sure and so nervously declared the incident a false alarm. ‘I had a funny feeling in my gut,’ Petrov recalled years later. ‘And I did not want to make a mistake.’
The world was saved from catastrophe. It transpired the incident was not unique – the Soviet early warning systems were unreliable – but it was by far the most serious. ‘It was just one of several incidents during the Cold War that might have triggered a nuclear conflict,’ recounted Gordon Barrass, a former MI6 officer, in The Great Cold War – A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors:
Although the US and the Soviet Union never engaged in direct military conflict, the Cold War was much more serious that most people imagine…The Cold War was a struggle, not a game of chess.
But the similarity between today’s unease and the near-miss of nuclear war in 1983 does not stop at Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling. There is an uncanny resemblance with the previous Cold War thanks to the use and impact of misinformation and deception to needlessly raises tensions. For instance, in 2022, Russia falsely alleged that Ukraine was developing weapons of mass destruction in a laboratory with secret US assistance. In fact, the laboratory was being used to research dangerous diseases – not bioweapons. But the Kremlin’s false claims were backed by China, further ramping up tensions.
In 1981, Andropov, then KGB chairman, told his startled colleagues at a specially-convened meeting that the US was planning a nuclear first-strike attack which would obliterate the Soviet Union. In response, the KGB launched the largest intelligence operation in Russian history. Codenamed ‘Operation Ryan’, a Russian acronym for ‘nuclear missile attack’, its purpose was to collect intelligence to prove a nuclear onslaught was imminent.
In reality, Ryan was derived from the paranoid instincts and delusions of Andropov. The ‘attack’ was a myth and pressurised KGB officers resorted to bizarre methods to find ‘proof’, such as monitoring the price of blood at British blood banks – clearly a sign of the country preparing for mass casualties and stockpiling. Other suspicious activities included lights staying on late at night at the Ministry of Defence on Whitehall, and the frequency of meetings between prime minister Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. For the KGB, these were sure signs the UK was preparing for thermonuclear Armageddon.
Based on Orwellian neurosis, Operation Ryan was a classic case of spies manipulating the facts to prove a pre-conceived conspiracy theory. When a leaked US national security council report offered proof that the West’s nuclear arsenal reflected a defensive doctrine, the document was quietly suppressed by the KGB and not shown to the Kremlin. ‘Had the Soviets had better intelligence on the main adversary, it would have discovered the US government had no plans for a nuclear first strike,’ said former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin.
The KGB specialised in fabricating documents to persuade the West that the US was planning a global nuclear war. Forgeries and bogus letters to and from the Nato secretary-general and US defence officials were leaked, which suggested America was devising secret plans to secure more support for the use of nuclear weapons in western Europe. Signatures were faked and it did not matter that most of the forgeries were dismissed as hoaxes. If one fabricated document was accepted as genuine, that was good enough. It was like multiple drops of water falling on a stone.
Despite the absence of evidence, Ryan was maintained for most of President Reagan’s first term in office as it had the extra benefit of ‘informing’ the public that the US president was a warmonger. The operation was only abandoned when Andropov died in February 1984.
Forty years later, such malign tactics are alive and flourishing in Ukraine. In fact, Russian deception and influence operations are even more powerful in raising tension and the fear of nuclear escalation. Their modern incarnations are more terrifying, with greater range, speed and impact made possible thanks to new technology. As such, they can influence events on a frightening scale. A Chatham House analyst stated the firing of conventionally armed nuclear-capable missiles at Ukraine last month was accompanied by ‘mixed messaging with the potential for misinterpretation which could lead to decisions being made under false assumptions’.
‘The FSB is very active on social media, telegram channels and online forums and using these platforms to send out fake news and try to create panic among our people,’ said Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, former head of the Ukrainian security service. ‘They also send out messages to people through robotic messaging systems to make people panic.’ As the intelligence expert and author Edward Lucas observed: ‘Russia’s spymasters are now using not only old tools against us, but also new ones of which their Soviet-era predecessors could only have dreamed.’
In 1983, an intelligent, honest and independently-minded Russian defence official saved hundreds of millions of lives from nuclear obliteration. Let’s hope there are like-minded individuals working in that same secret bunker near Moscow who will make the same decision, despite Putin’s nuclear rhetoric and chilling threats.
Olaf Scholz’s dreams of election victory are wishful thinking
Three years ago today, Olaf Scholz was sworn in as Germany’s chancellor. He had narrowly won the election by presenting himself as Angela Merkel’s natural successor. Appearing as the continuity candidate was good enough to clinch it in 2021, but Scholz is unlikely to pull that off again in Germany’s snap election, expected to be held on 23 February next year.
Scholz’s Social Democratic party (SPD) appears to have reached a nadir. Polls give it 15 or 16 per cent of the vote share, third place behind the centre-right CDU/CSU in first place and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in second. You’d have to go back to the 19th century to see a worse result for the SPD, Germany’s oldest party. It would be a disaster for them should it become a political reality at the ballot box.
Trying to ride a wave of Merkel nostalgia isn’t going to work this time around
Yet Scholz seems confident that he can turn things around. ‘Some may have written us off already,’ he defiantly told a party conference last weekend. ‘Don’t listen to them! They were wrong the last time. They are wrong now.’ He was alluding to the fact that the SPD had similar polling figures in May 2021 but went on to win the election with him at the helm that September.
Many Social Democrats (including Scholz himself) are desperate to believe in the possibility of another election fairytale. What should have been a crisis meeting last weekend was dubbed a Wahlsiegkonferenz – ‘election victory conference’ – encapsulating perfectly the gulf between the party’s self-image and its public perception. Scholz’s pep talk was met with a standing ovation from the packed hall of supporters. As the German weekly Die Zeit put it, ‘the SPD is capable of whipping itself into euphoria like no other party.’
But the veneer of jubilation is thin for the party. Much has changed in the last three years, not least Scholz’s own standing. In a recent survey, only one in five people judged him to be a good candidate for chancellor – that put him in fifth place behind people from his own party, the CDU/CSU, the Greens and the AfD.
A poll among SPD members even suggested that only a third of them wanted Scholz to lead the party into the next election. The question as to whether he might be replaced by defence minister Boris Pistorius, who has topped popularity rankings for months now, was wide open until Pistorius withdrew from the unspoken contest in late November. The display of unity at the SPD conference last week papered over those cracks with impressive zeal.
More important than internal SPD rifts is the fact that Germany is no longer the country it was in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, shortly after Scholz took office, triggered an energy crisis alongside one of identity. Germans now pay the highest electricity prices in Europe, and the country is deeply divided about the war in Ukraine with one recent survey suggesting that half of Germans want no further weapon deliveries for Kyiv.
There has also been a huge surge of refugees and irregular migrants into the country since Scholz took office. Alongside the 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees, over 800,000 asylum claims were registered over the last three years. Now, nearly half of welfare recipients in Germany are non-Germans. The social, political and economic strain of this is so large that immigration consistently ranks as the biggest concern of voters.
Of course, Scholz can’t be held solely responsible for these issues. Neither is he entirely to blame for the economic trouble Germany is in as Europe’s largest economy stares down the barrel of its first two-year recession in more than two decades. Many of Germany’s woes are caused by structural issues that require complex, long-term solutions. But the fact remains that these things happened or got worse under him. Compared to 2021, Germans now live in a country where they fear economic decline, war and social conflict.
Presenting as the sensible continuity candidate will be a hard sell for the Chancellor under the circumstances. He forgets that it was a hard sell in 2021 too. Far from the glowing, personal victory, he presents it as, his party only received a quarter of the vote, which was just about enough to allow it to clinch victory over the CDU/CSU by 1.5 per cent. It was the worst result of any election winner in Germany’s post-war history.
Three years ago, a vote for Scholz was also often more of a vote against the deeply unpopular Armin Laschet who had replaced Angela Merkel as the CDU/CSU candidate. A survey taken just before the election suggested that only 12 per cent of people wanted Laschet to be chancellor. He was so unpopular that more conservative voters rooted for Scholz than for him.
This opened an opportunity for Scholz to present himself as Merkel’s heir – despite standing for a different party. Their parties were in a grand coalition at the time and Scholz was Merkel’s vice chancellor. He went as far as posing for a photograph with his fingertips pressed together in her trademark gesture, the Merkel rhombus.
Trying to ride a wave of Merkel nostalgia isn’t going to work this time around, particularly when her legacy has come under such fire. Her freshly released memoirs have been widely criticised for not showing much self-reflection on the same issues Scholz is facing: immigration, energy, Russia and the sluggish economy.
All Scholz can point to is his own record in office: three years most people will remember for a sense of crisis and the failure of Scholz’s dysfunctional coalition to address their concerns.
The one glimmer of hope is that his rival, Friedrich Merz of the CDU/CSU, is also not particularly popular. A survey released earlier this week asking people who they would vote for if they could elect the chancellor directly suggested that Scholz is catching up with him. But Merz is still leading. He’s not anywhere near as unpopular as Laschet, and 2025 isn’t 2021. As it stands, the polls indicate that the CDU/CSU would gain a third of the vote, twice as much as the SPD.
Germans want change – a message that ruling parties always find difficult to deliver. If Scholz is to turn things around as he did three years ago, it’ll take a lot more than standing ovations and wishful thinking to do so.
How working-class Dublin turned on Conor McGregor
When Conor McGregor stood in the dock for his civil rape trial last week, the controversial MMA fighter was receiving the kind of global media attention he had always craved. Just not for the reasons he would have wanted.
In court, the 12-person jury found him liable for the rape and sexual assault of Nikita Hand, and awarded her £208,000 in damages. This was the latest nail hammered into a career which has been marred by sporting controversies, sexual misbehaviour and appallingly thuggish behaviour.
The circumstances which brought McGregor before the civil court were as tawdry as people had come to expect from the Dublin brawler. One Friday night in December 2018, McGregor had booked a hotel suite where he planned to finish the night. After messaging Nikita Hand on social media, he took her back to his hotel.
McGregor’s team claimed that he was the victim of a ruthless gold digger. Ms Hand’s team on the other hand, pointed out that such was the ferocity of the attack, her tampon had to be surgically removed afterwards. When she addressed the media outside the court room, her words resonated with many Irish women: ‘I want to show my daughter (Freya) and every other young girl and boy that you can stand up for yourself if something happens to you, no matter who the person is, and justice will be done.’
The verdict came as no surprise to all but his most slavish followers. And the reaction afterwards has shown how happy the people of Dublin are to wash their hands of the star.
McGregor was the classic rags to riches to story. From the working-class enclave of Crumlin, he had, through a genuinely impressive combination of guts, determination and a flair for self promotion turned himself into a global brand with an estimated net worth of close to £600 million (with typical modesty he claims he is worth ‘closer to a billion’).
Only a fraction of that figure has been accrued through fighting. Instead, McGregor has made immensely lucrative investments and endorsements. Three years after he established his own brand of whiskey, Proper No. Twelve, (named after Crumlin’s postcode), he sold his majority stake to Proximo Spirits for roughly $600 million.
He also has commercial interests in several luxury clothing brands and famously bought a pub, the Black Forge, in the area he grew up in. But it was in another pub nearby, the Marble Arch, where locals really began to dislike McGregor. In 2019 he was caught on camera sucker punching a local punter who had refused a free shot of his whiskey.
McGregor’s political aspirations have drawn scorn too. Like a young Alexander who has run out of pubs to buy and old men to beat up, in September this year McGregor set his sights on becoming President of Ireland, stating with admirable certainty ‘I am the only logical choice.’
Warming to his theme, which may or may not have occurred while testing a batch of his own whiskey, he informed Ireland that: ‘As President, I hold the power to summon the Dail as well as dissolve it… I have all the answers the people of Ireland seek.’
He was dragged further into the political mire in November, when the Dublin riots saw police cars and trams burned out. McGregor tweeted: ‘Ireland, we are at war!’ And: ‘There is grave danger among us in Ireland that should never be here in the first place…. Make change or make way. Ireland for the victory!’
As the Irish government desperately scrambled to find out the cause of the riots, politicians accused McGregor of incitement and the Gardai refused to rule out investigating him.
Yet while the chattering classes sneered, McGregor was picking up a large and devoted following among young disaffected men. The fact that the likes of the professional misogynist Andrew Tate defended his Irish friend shows the sewers in which he now swims. His supporters have convinced themselves that their hero is the victim of a deep state hit job designed to ruin his chances of becoming president, which is as absurd as it sounds. Given McGregor’s consistently irrational behaviour, it’s not impossible that he announces a presidential run next year. It would be pointless, but typical.
As things stand McGregor is finished in Ireland. Within 24 hours of the recent verdict, liquor stores had removed all his products from their shelves. Former regulars were boycotting his pubs. Much his vast fan base had unfollowed him on social media. Most humiliatingly of all, the gyms and fight clubs which held him up as a role model removed his posters and painted over his murals. He is a busted flush in Ireland.
If he had any common sense, McGregor would simply retire from public life, and stop trying to feed his ravenous ego. But as even a casual observer of the man who has brought shame to Dublin’s working class will tell you, the words ‘common sense’ and ‘Conor McGregor’ rarely go together.
In Donbas, Ukrainians hope Trump can end the war
Not a single home remains intact in the village of Bohorodychne in Donbas, since it was torn apart by artillery back in 2022. There are signs warning about mines everywhere. The local school is ripped apart and burned-out. Military vehicles are camped in the village and in the fields. No shops are open. Even the local Russian Orthodox church has been destroyed in the fighting.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, approximately 700 people lived in Bohorodychne. Now, only a fraction remain. They roam the streets as Ukrainian military cars drive through the village on the way to the frontline, some 30 kilometres away. Everyone here depends on aid groups to deliver food, warm clothes, and even dog food.
It would pain her to see Vladimir Putin claim Ukrainian land in a peace deal, but she doesn’t see any real alternative
Only the outer walls remain of what used to be 68-year-old Lyubov Doroshenko’s home. She walks around the rubble, pointing to where she used to sleep, where the kitchen was, and where her kids played when they were growing up. Volunteers have built her a makeshift house next to the old one. The village is said to have changed hands 14 times since the Russian assault in 2022.
‘I just want peace. Nothing more. Just peace. People told me that Trump has been elected president of the US and that he wants peace. I hope he succeeds’ says Doroshenko, who left Bohorodychne back in 2022 but returned soon after the Russians left.
‘This is my home. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Only here’ she says and adds that if the Russians were to return, she would not want to leave again.
Doroshenko points out that she doesn’t know much about politics, especially in the US. She knows about President-elect Donald Trump only because locals talk about him and from the news on her radio.
‘But I know of war. I know what war is. Everyone here knows what war is and we are so tired. This used to be a great village, where tourists came to relax at the river’ Doroshenko says, ‘I don’t think that we can win this war. Not anymore. So, maybe we will need to talk.’
She grimaces, knowing that it might not be popular to say in Ukraine, where tens of thousands have lost their lives trying to stop the Russian army. It would pain her to see Vladimir Putin claim Ukrainian land in a peace deal, but she doesn’t see any real alternative.
From her window, she can see the Ukrainian soldiers drive towards the frontline, knowing many will not return home. Doroshenko just wishes the killing would stop.
‘I hate the Russians. It is the truth. I ask God, how this can happen? How is it possible that we can have such a war? I don’t know why but I must trust that God has a plan.’
‘But I fear that even if peace comes, life will never be the same. Too much is destroyed. You will have to build a new village. So many are dead, gone. It is a doomed place’ she argues and points out that Bohorodychne is like a wasteland like many other places in Donbas.
The Russians are on the move in Donbas, where the Ukrainian Army is struggling due to a lack of weapons and men. Doroshenko fears a collapse, something she says could happen fast if Donald Trump decides to cut military aid to Ukraine. Everyone is tired.
Doroshenko isn’t alone in her desire for peace and negotiations. A new survey by Gallup, conducted in August and October, shows that 52 per cent of Ukrainians would like to see a negotiated peace as soon as possible, while 38 per cent want to continue fighting until victory. Of the people ready for negotiations, 52 percent are open to territorial concessions.
Fifty-five-year-old Mykola pushes his bicycle next to destroyed homes and minefields. He is on his way to collect aid for the harsh winter months. Back in 2022, he and his mother were the only ones who refused to evacuate from Bohorodychne, when the Russian assault began. He didn’t want to leave his home and claimed that he cursed the Russian soldiers when they entered the village. They claimed to come as liberators.
‘I couldn’t understand that,’ says Mykola, ‘And now, I don’t know what will happen. I have heard about this guy Trump. That he is a businessman. I don’t know. He wants peace. I want peace, so let’s hope that he can do something. Life right now is shit.’
‘To be honest, I can’t see an end to this. You ask me if peace is possible. My answer is that I don’t know. Can there be a compromise? I don’t know. Only Putin knows,’ says Mykola, who thinks that Ukraine in theory should be open to the possibility of territorial concessions.
Bohorodychne is not new to war. It was also a battlefield during the second world war when Nazi Germany occupied the village from 1941 to 1943. Residents have heard their grandparents tell stories about it. Mykola can’t believe that war has come here again.
Mykola’s dog runs next to him. He has named it Putin because of its aggressive nature. Like the Russian president, it cannot be trusted, he says and adds that Donald Trump might soon find out that any deal with Putin isn’t worth the paper it is written on.
‘But again, I don’t know what will happen,’ says Mykola, who adds that he just focuses on what he can do, such as gathering enough firewood to stay warm.
There isn’t any electricity in Bohorodychne. Some locals have received a generator, others have not. It makes the winter months long, dark, and depressing.
Mykola greets other locals at a meeting point in the city. They also wait for aid. His 57-year-old friend Yura is already there. They shake hands and Yura smiles. He is unemployed like many people here.
‘Trump will make peace, I really think so. We have to talk to Russia. We cannot continue,’ Yura says, while others are listening. He also doesn’t believe that victory is possible.
Yura hopes that Donald Trump will increase military aid so that Ukraine can negotiate from a position of strength.
‘No, no, no. You can’t talk to Putin. You cannot trust him. It is not possible. Trump will not succeed. Putin wants to take everything,’ says Sergey, another local.
Everyone wants the war to end here. The only question is how.
South Korea is still haunted by the Gwangju Uprising
The news that President Yoon had instated martial law on Tuesday hit me hard. The last time martial law was declared in South Korea, in May 1980, I was a Peace Corps volunteer living in Gwangju, a city in the south west of the country. Peaceful protests against martial law took place in the city, until the military moved in and killed hundreds of ordinary people.
What became known as the Gwangju Uprising changed Korea, and me, forever. I was one of a handful of foreigners to witness the uprising, and ended up translating for the few foreign reporters who managed to get into the city.
Forty-four years later, I couldn’t help but worry that something similar would happen again this week. Several Facebook posts noted the inauspicious timing of President Yoon’s declaration of martial law – which thankfully has now been rescinded. In just a few days the Korean novelist Han Kang will receive the Nobel prize for literature. One of her best-known books, Human Acts, is about the Gwangju Uprising. It is an event that many in Korea still haven’t come to terms with.
The Gwangju Uprising began after General Chun Doo-hwan came to power in a coup on Dec 12 1979, following the assassination of President Park Chung Hee. Five months after General Chun declared martial law, protesting students in Gwangju were fired on and killed by the South Korean army.
In response, residents of the city took up arms and forced the army out of city. Chun tried to destroy the will and the power of the people through killing, intimidation, and brute force. His troops encircled our city for a week – with no one able to enter or leave. I’ll never forget the sight of long lines of people waiting to sign up to volunteer in the days after the army entrapped the city. People offered to man the perimeter and fight off the military. Others helped cook for those who needed it and volunteered to drive foreign journalists to wherever they wanted to go in town.
Gwangju residents were resilient, and defied Chun’s expectation that they would quickly surrender. That same ‘we’re in this together’ attitude was demonstrated this week in Seoul (and Gwangju) when people came out on the streets in defiance of martial law. Koreans were adamant that their democracy, although young, was worth saving.
In the end, the South Korean army took back control of Gwangju, killing more people. I had escaped, hiking over the nearby hills just before they invaded.For years they claimed that only 165 people were killed in Gwangju, but in reality the death toll was much higher.
In 1980, General Chun was able to shape the entire narrative about what happened in Gwangju. According to him, the protesters were either hoodlums or North Korean agitators. Koreans may be ethnically homogenous but there are regional differences. In 1980 people living in Seoul tended to look down on people coming from Gwangju and the surrounding southeastern province. They were considered rebellious and untrustworthy, and the area was the least developed in the country. It was easy for Chun to demonise us after the uprising.
Chun remained in power for eight years and his false narrative was the only one most Koreans heard. It solidified over time and, even today, when I visit Korea, I find some people, mostly the elderly, who still believe that the Gwangju protestors were communist agitators. It was only in 1997 that the massacre was officially recognised by the state with a memorial day.
Times have changed, however, in South Korea. While President Yoon may have been channeling General Chun with his claim that martial law was needed to crack down on ‘communist forces’ and ‘anti-state elements’, that kind of rhetoric doesn’t wash anymore in the middle of bustling, cosmopolitan Seoul. No one in the country was going to stand for it. The ubiquitousness of social media played a role too and meant that even though Yoon made his declaration in the middle of the night, and placed the media under government control, the news of the attempted coup spread like wildfire. If mobiles had existed in 1980, it seems likely that the Gwangju massacre would never have happened – Chun would have been ousted within days.
So, what happens now? Yoon’s days are certainly numbered. South Korean legislators are calling for his impeachment and the police are investigating claims of treason against him and his ministers.
But I’d hope as well that Korea uses this opportunity to reexamine its past, which is often swept under the carpet. An exhaustive national report on the Gwangju Uprising, commissioned by the previous president, was recently completed and could be a useful guide.
A friend of mine once noted that the Gwangju Uprising was considered ‘ancient history’ in Korea. I suspect it will be much more relevant now to younger South Koreans. They’ve learned this week, as the people of Gwangju did 44 years ago, both how strong – and fragile – democracy can be.
Will Kemi’s ‘Operation Slow Burn’ help her see off Farage?
It was quite possible that Kemi Badenoch could have proved an instant hit with the British public and taken the Tories straight into a sizeable opinion poll lead. External factors could have fallen in her favour, enabling her not only to capitalise on the unpopularity of Keir Starmer and Labour, but also to win back support from Nigel Farage and Reform. There are several combinations of circumstances which could have led to such an outcome. These versions of the future would have seen Badenoch swiftly become regarded by voters as the obvious Next Big Thing that Britain needs to lift it out of the doldrums, Thatcher-style. But it hasn’t panned out like that.
The thinking is that there is no point trying to stop the Reform surge
Two big events have occurred during her first weeks as Tory leader which have taken the wind out of Badenoch’s sails and put it into Farage’s. First, there was the paradigm-busting nature and extent of Donald Trump’s election victory, at which Farage had a ringside seat.
Secondly, there were those scarcely believable upward revisions in the immigration volumes over which Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak had presided and the sense of betrayal they re-ignited in the electorate.
So now expectations are reversed. Most good judges think Reform will surge to new heights early next year with Labour already widely loathed and the Tories occupying the status Les Dawson once reserved for his late mother-in-law: gone but not forgiven.
Reform’s polling is already tracking sharply upwards and it is once more attracting notable defections from the Conservative fold. At Tory Christmas drinks dos across Westminster this week, the talk was all about who will next join the Light Blue peril. The consensus is already that Badenoch has been a disappointment: too cautious, too conventional and failing to embrace the rebellious spirit of the times.
What is Badenoch to do? She has two broad options. One would be to go in for an early reset, Keir Starmer-style. This would see her seek to match Farage punch for punch on immigration, climate change policy and other populist right touchstone issues.
Despite growing anxiety among her MPs about the possibility of Reform actually bursting into a nationwide poll lead in time for the county council elections in May, she seems most unlikely to go down that path.
Instead, an approach being referred to as ‘Operation Slow Burn’ is finding favour. This requires persuading inveterate panickers in the Tory ranks – or perhaps that should be invertebrate panickers – to hold their nerve.
The thinking is that there is no point trying to stop the Reform surge – that it is already baked-in and could well last up to and beyond the Welsh Senedd elections of 2026.
The way to shore up Tory prospects, Slow-Burners contend, is simply to have more credible and robust policies to offer voters than the insurgent party does by the second half of this parliament. Badenoch is good at holding her nerve: witness her refusal to match Robert Jenrick’s eye-catching immigration pledges during the leadership contest.
Her Slow-Burners believe that with the extra success coming Reform’s way will come extra scrutiny that will, in time, take some of the air out of its balloon. Meanwhile, they hope Badenoch will gain in authority and credibility by sticking to her project to re-engineer the Conservative offer over the next three years.
Badenoch is good at holding her nerve
After all, while Reform grabbed the runner-up spot in 98 seats in July – 89 of them in constituencies won by Labour – the Tories came second to Labour in 219 seats and second to the Lib Dems in another 64.
So if the dominant impulse among right-leaning voters at the next general election is simply a determination to get Labour out, then the Tories can hope to sell the idea that they are best-placed to do the job in more than twice as many seats as Reform is.
Of course, this will depend on Reform’s surge not having been so huge and so durable as to crash that logic. It will also need right-leaning voters to believe they can rely on a Badenoch-led Tory party to be notably more conservative than the party was in office from 2010-2024 if it gets another sniff of power. Getting candidate selection right for winnable seats is therefore about to take on enormous and totemic importance.
Will Syria’s new rulers show mercy?
The late Henry Kissinger said of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s that it was a shame that both sides couldn’t lose. Much the same is true of the current situation in Syria, where the long established regime of the brutal but secular Assad dynasty looks increasingly likely to fall to a sudden Islamist rebel offensive.
Syria has been convulsed by a vicious and multi-sided conflict since 2012 when riots against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad turned into a full-scale civil war. Assad, a London trained ophthalmologist, had reluctantly become the heir apparent to his iron-fisted father Hafez al-Assad (the surname means ‘the lion’) after the death of his more political brother Bassel in a car crash.
Recalled from Britain, Bashar soon grew into the dictator’s role, however, and since Hafez’s death in 2000, has proved every bit as brutal and ruthless a ruler as his father. Hafez, like Saddam Hussein in neighbouring Iraq, rose to power in a series of coups in the 1960s on the back of the Ba’ath party – a secular and socialist Arab nationalist movement opposed to both Islamism and western domination.
Will Syria’s new rulers restrain their followers?
The regime he established was a one-party dictatorship dominated by the Assads’ own minority Alawite sect. The Alawites are a breakaway offshoot of Shia Islam, regarded as heretics by the Sunni majority in Syria who make up perhaps 75 per cent of the population. The Alawites comprise only around 15 per cent, and there are also significant Christian and Druze communities in the country.
When Syria was a French colony between the world wars, the French favoured the Alawites as part of a divide and rule policy, and promoted them to influential posts, particularly in the military. Hafez al-Assad was originally an Air Force officer, and today the Alawites hold all the key positions in Syria’s armed forces and its feared secret police, the mukhabarat.
The Alawite dominance naturally bred resentment among the Sunni majority, and in 1982 fuelled an uprising led by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city, which was savagely crushed by Hafez’s army and Alawite militias with the deaths of up to 40,000 people in the city.
This week, Hama was seized by the Islamist HTS rebel movement, who released fellow Islamists imprisoned in the city jail who vowed vengeance against the Assads with the chilling words ‘May their hearts burn’.
Any westerner travelling in Syria before the civil war broke out was struck by two things: the fact that the country is probably the most westernised and secular of all Arab states, with women walking freely on their own in western clothes, and a pervasive fear of the regime, which had established stability with a pervasive police state. Mukhabarat agents were everywhere.
The anti-Assad forces who finally rebelled in 2012 were a ragbag coalition ranging from Islamist fanatics linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State and western-backed liberals looking to establish democracy. Soon the Islamists became predominant, enabling the regime to portray them as ‘terrorists’ and making their western backers uneasy. In 2013, the Westminster parliament narrowly voted against David Cameron’s attempt to intervene in the civil war on the anti-Assad side, and then-president Obama used this as an excuse not to join in either – although Assad had crossed his ‘red lines’ and used poison gas against the rebels.
There were no limits to Assad’s violence against his own rebellious people. Torture was routine in the regime’s jails, and human rights monitors estimate that 32,000 have died in them as a result. Despite such repression, the rebels made sweeping gains across the country, seizing its second city Aleppo and even capturing swathes of the ancient capital Damascus.
It looked then as if the regime was about to fall, but the Assads have been a close ally of Russia since the Cold War, and Putin was unlikely to let his naval bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast around the port of Latakia – the Alawite heartland where the Assads hail from – fall into hostile hands. Russia intervened militarily on a massive scale to save his ally, as did Iran, the world’s leading Shiite power, along with its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah.
Russian planes pounded Aleppo’s centre to rubble with barrel bombs, and Hezbollah fighters crossed from Lebanon to help the regime retake the city. By 2020 the war had reached a stalemate, with the regime holding all the major cities and most of the ground between them, while the rebels were penned into Idlib province near the Turkish border where Turkey’s President Erdogan was battling Kurdish militants who had also got involved in the Syrian conflict.
All that suddenly changed last week when in a carefully planned surprise offensive the main rebel group, the Turkish backed HTS, erupted out of Idlib and retook Aleppo in a matter of hours. The situation today is dramatically different from 2014: Putin’s armies are fully occupied with their war against Ukraine; Iran is otherwise engaged in its undeclared conflict with Israel, and Hezbollah has been crippled by Israeli air strikes.
The situation is shifting with dramatic speed and after HTS’s seizure of Aleppo and Hama they are closing in on Syria‘s third biggest city Homs, which is just two hour’s drive from their ultimate target Damascus – and the suddenly vulnerable Assad himself.
Russia has already advised its citizens to leave Syria, but if what was unthinkable last week comes to pass and Putin’s client regime in Damascus collapses, it will represent a huge and humiliating defeat for Moscow and a major strategic setback for both Russia and Iran.
More serious still, will Syria’s new rulers if they win restrain their followers from massacring the Alawites who have lorded it over them for so long? The HTS leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, who decoupled his movement from al Qaeda and rebranded it in more moderate colours in 2016, has assured Syria’s non-Sunni minorities – including Christians – that they have nothing to fear and can continue to worship unmolested, but the record of Islamist takeovers elsewhere in the region is not exactly reassuring.
Even if there is not outright genocide, there is bound to be a thirst for revenge against Assad’s Alawites, and almost inevitably another mass migration by waves of refugees from the devastated country lapping on Europe’s shores.
How Finland joined the West
Finland’s entry into Nato in 2023 dealt a major blow to Russia in the Baltics. For years, President Putin had warned his Finnish counterparts that a decision to join the alliance would be met with an appropriate response, but the implicit threat has been slow to materialise. In February, Russia reconstituted its Leningrad Military District, a Soviet-era administrative region tasked with defending Russia’s northwestern territories, but otherwise there’s been a palpable quiet in the far north. In recent weeks, this has begun to change.
On 18 November, the sole fibre optic cable linking Finland and Germany was severed, and hours after a cable connecting Sweden and Lithuania was also cut. The German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, was quick to declare the incident an act of sabotage and a ‘hybrid action’ but so far no culprit has been named. Suspicion has fallen on a Chinese merchant ship, the Yi Peng 3, which sailed from Russia with a cargo of fertiliser and has been anchored in Danish territorial waters for three weeks, encircled by Nato warships.
In a similar maritime incident late last year, the Balticconnector gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia was damaged after the Newnew Polar Bear, another ship with ties to both Russia and China, seemed to have ‘accidentally’ dragged its anchor across it. On Monday, a third fibre optic cable was damaged near Helsinki. The Finns say it was a construction accident, but amid these heightened tensions a pattern seems to be emerging.
The threat of hybrid warfare against Finland is nothing new
On 30 October, former President Sauli Niinisto published a highly anticipated report, titled Safer Together: Strengthening Europe’s Civilian and Military Preparedness and Readiness, meant to bolster the EU’s resilience to various threats. ‘We need to deter malicious actors who are currently conducting a hybrid campaign against us with relative impunity,’ he said while presenting the report to Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels. Among his suggestions were long-term investments in strategic infrastructure, ‘deterrence through preparedness,’ and, most notably, a central European intelligence agency.
In Helsinki, Niinisto, who left office earlier this year, told me that Finland brings an additional burden to Nato given its proximity to Russia, but also the Finnish ‘Sisu,’ a particular sensibility, meaning, in his words, ‘a mindset of being as strong as small can be.’ In his experience, strength is the only thing that matters when dealing with Moscow, and it’s an area where Europe desperately needs to improve as America’s attention turns toward the Pacific. Emphasising his point, Niinisto recounted to me a story from the Bolshevik revolution. ‘Lenin gave advice to his soldiers: “Try it with a bayonet. If you meet soft, push, if you meet steel, retreat.” This kind of lesson is also in Putin’s head.’
Esa Rautalinko, the CEO of Patria, Finland’s largest defence contractor, is now on the front lines of Europe’s rearmament, and has no illusions as to the scale of the problem Europe now faces. ‘Looking at the deficit that Europe has today, especially when it comes to hardware, and software as well, its trillions of dollars,’ he told me, adding that Europe’s rearmament ‘should be somewhere in the ballpark of our ambitions on green transition and green energy.’
Finland’s history is characterised by its geographic isolation and a mercurial relationship with its eastern neighbour. Since the closure of the land border with Russia last December (a single railway crossing remains open for now), Finland’s economy has become increasingly insular. The roads connecting to Sweden and Norway via Lapland in the far north see little commercial traffic, while the Finnish railway network, like that of nearly all former subjects of the Russian Empire, is Russian gauge, incompatible with the rest of Europe’s rail network. That leaves roughly 95 per cent of the country’s trade to come in and out by sea, where it is far more vulnerable to disruption.
This decoupling has not been good for the Finnish economy. The economic divergence began in 2008, when the weakening of the ruble slowed Russia’s appetite for Finnish goods, but the sanctions levied against Russia after the seizure of Crimea accelerated the trend, with cross-border tourism plummeting in 2014 as food and agriculture exports fell by 75 per cent. As a result, Finland’s post-2022 decoupling from Russia was less of a blow, but the eastern part of the country has seen a real estate market collapse and almost no external investment. Under the circumstances, the threat of hybrid warfare carries dire implications.
The fact is, Finland is very unlikely to be attacked through conventional means. Its geography is dominated by thousands of lakes and dense, evergreen forests that make it exceedingly difficult to invade, not to mention that Finland is conspicuously well prepared for war. A system of general conscription, the most comprehensive in Europe, ensures that all males are called to serve at the age of 18 and remain reservists for much of their lives. Finland also possesses the largest artillery in Europe and a formidable arsenal of tanks and fighter planes. Alongside Nato membership, Finland signed a bilateral Defence Cooperation Agreement with the United States last December, which came into effect on 1 September. The agreement gives US forces access to 15 sites across Finland, including airfields, a naval base and logistical infrastructure near the Russian border. Further measures, such as nuclear weapons sharing, are treated delicately, but have not been ruled out.
Recently, the Finnish defence community has debated whether or not to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention, which prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines. Doing so would enable them to deploy such landmines along the Russo-Finnish border. The farther Finland moves away from its historic non-alignment, the more Russia feels the urge to retaliate. Without many conventional options, Russia may have settled on a shadowy game of sabotage and diversion in an attempt to even the score.
The threat of hybrid warfare against Finland is nothing new. One notable, early instance of it occurred in 2015, when, amid the European migrant crisis, a suspicious inflow of people came across the Russian border. There were only a few thousand of them, but upon investigation, it was found that many of them had been legally resident in Russia for years, only to have their authorisations suddenly revoked. They’d then been sent to the border. Russo-Finnish border cooperation had been very good as far back as the Cold War, but this time, when the Finns made formal inquiries, they struggled to reach their counterparts. When negotiations were finally held, their officials were told that depending on what Finland chose to do in the future, Russia could release up to 1.4 million people into their country of 5.6 million.
Back in 2022, public opinion on Nato membership shifted dramatically. In January, a poll by the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat revealed that a mere 28 per cent of the public supported full membership in the alliance, consistent with the previous decades. In March, just three weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, a poll from the Finnish public broadcaster Yle showed that 62 per cent were now in favour of joining, and in May, the parliament voted 184-7 to start the accession process.
Russia operates its secretive GUGI deep-sea warfare program out of Olenya bay in the Kola peninsula
Mika Niikko, a former Finns Party MP who served as the chairman of the foreign relations committee until February 2022, abstained from that vote. He believes that the process was rushed and told me that the country’s political leadership was afraid of foreign influence corrupting the process. ‘At that time, a referendum was seen as essential. However, both the parliament and the President changed their minds about asking the public’s opinion,’ he said. ‘There was concern about foreign influence on the vote outcome and the belief that the public might not fully understand the issue.’
‘In my opinion, there was no reason to fear a referendum, and I don’t believe the result would have been any different,’ Niikko added.
Sir Ben Wallace, who visited Finland in January 2022 in his capacity as UK defence minister, told me recently that the move had caught him off guard. ‘There was no secret agenda to bring them in, and it took us completely by surprise, including one of the wisest leaders in Europe, Sauli Niinisto. No one thought that Finland would join,’ he said. Wallace, now a partner at the private equity fund Boka Group, believes that acts of sabotage targeting Finland and other Nato countries will continue, while stopping short of a direct confrontation. ‘You’ll see a growth in infrastructure attacks but still subthreshold. What is really telling is that, despite it all, Russia has been very cautious to never cross into Nato countries. I think you’ll see more of the cable thing, just because they can.’
Russia operates its secretive GUGI deep-sea warfare program out of Olenya bay in the Kola peninsula. Among their capabilities is the means to sabotage undersea infrastructure like cables and pipelines. ‘Their program has been going on for a long time and all of us have been slow to respond,’ Wallace warned.
After fighting the Soviets in the Winter War and Continuation War, Finland lost 12 per cent of its landmass, its second largest city, Viipuri, and one of Europe’s largest nickel deposits at Petsamo in the arctic. Nonetheless, the country defended itself so well that Stalin forever abandoned his hopes of annexing Finland into the Soviet Union. This resilience enabled the postwar presidents Juho Paasikivi and Urho Kekkonen to formulate a doctrine of active neutrality, enabling decades of peace and prosperity in the shadow of great power conflict. Finland has since chosen a different path, and its place in the security networks of the West is now written in stone. But given the vulnerabilities of Finnish geography, these recent ‘hybrid’ incidents, cloaked in a veil of uncertainty, will be a challenge for the small Nordic state. What’s worse, they may only be a preview of what is to come.
Will the Syrian Civil War create another ISIS?
There are unintended consequences, and then there are unintended consequences. What we are seeing in Syria, as Aleppo and Hama fall (and Homs braces itself) to a coalition of anti-regime forces whose DNA is to be found in al-Qaeda et al, is an unintended consequence of Israel’s bombardment in Syria of Iran-funded pro-Assad groups, and the pulverising of Hezbollah in Lebanon. An unintended consequence of the weakening of Iran and its Axis of Resistance. For the three pillars on which Bashar al-Assad props up (for the time being) his murderous kleptocratic narco-state – Iran, Hezbollah and Russia – are, respectively, on their ‘best’ behaviour in the hope of talks with the US, broken, or extremely distracted.
It is no coincidence that the assault on Aleppo begun at the same time as Hezbollah and Israel were finalising their highly fragile ceasefire. Those stunning (short-term) Israeli successes in Lebanon seem to have led to potentially stunning (long-term) reverses for the region in the shape of the resurrection of Sunni fundamentalism and a blood-soaked sectarian conflict (Christian Syrians are fleeing from the rebels as fast as they can). The civil war in Syria, once thought to have been ‘frozen’, is now definitely thawed. In the Middle East, what is local is regional; Kurds, Assad loyalists, Shia and Iran-backed militias and Turkey-backed Sunni militants are today fighting in a country that already contains Russian, Iranian, US and Turkish military forces.
In the years since the 2020 Russo-Turkish brokered peace deal regarding fighting over Idlib, the Syrian state has undergone a transformation; it is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine tablet that is wildly popular across the Middle East and currently causing devastation in Jordan and Gulf countries, much to the dismay of those nations’ ruling families. Safe in the receipt of billions of dollars from the drugs trade and with Russian and Iranian support on hand, you could have been forgiven for thinking that until ten days ago Assad was secure in his power for the foreseeable future. Indeed, his distastefully triumphant reappearance at the Arab League summit in Jeddah in May 2023 seemed to confirm this for all the world. But he has only ever been as powerful as Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah support has allowed. The Syrian army has, so far, proven itself to be of the paper tiger variety. It isn’t thought that Assad’s 50 per cent pay rise for his conscript army will have any positive impact on their performance on the battlefield.
This recent Syrian wobble (or topple) couldn’t have come at a worse time for US and Gulf policy makers, who had been, until recently, exploring the possibility of sanctions relief for Assad in an attempt to drive Damascus from the arms of Tehran, and Moscow. From what we can see, Hayat al-Tahrir al-Shams’ (HTS) lightning raid will only cause Assad to cleave closer to his erstwhile saviours, Khamenei and Putin, both of whom have sent men and airpower, respectively. This all presents Western policy makers with the thorniest of problems; which horse to back, if any?
If this situation deteriorates, the incoming Trump administration will be pressured to act. But in which direction, it’s not entirely clear. For throwing its weight in with the anti-Assad rebels could well upset the apple cart even further, creating a monster no one wants or needs. It was Trump who, in 2019, drew back US troops from the Kurdish Syrian areas, leaving the US’s Syrian Kurdish allies at the mercy of Turkish warplanes. And who knows how Russia and Iran would react if they felt an existential threat arising from a potentially failed Syrian state, into which they have both sunk enormous quantities of blood and treasure. Turkey, likewise, despite its uncompromising support for anti-Assad rebels (HTS included) and its simultaneously robust targeting of the Syrian Kurdish groups YPG (whom it sees as allied to its age-old enemy, the Kurdish separatist movement PKK) and the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces), will need a seat at the table. Russia, for its part won’t countenance the loss of Tartus, a strategically important seaport on the Syrian coast, Moscow’s Mediterranean foothold. And Iran simply can’t lose yet another strategic foothold in the region.
We shouldn’t forget that it was Assad who, in the early days of the Syrian Civil War, released thousands of Sunni fundamentalist prisoners
I wrote in these pages, back in October, that an Israeli invasion of Lebanon could end up creating ISIS 3.0. The fundamental shift of balance across the region created by Israel’s relentless targeting not just of Hezbollah in Lebanon, but also the US-Israeli airstrikes on pro-Assad Iranian-backed militias across Syria have all left Assad’s military vulnerabilities horribly exposed. Were Syria to become a rallying point for the region’s transnational Islamist groupings (and there are literally thousands of ISIS fighters and their children in SDF prisons and refugee camps), ISIS 3.0 could well come to pass. Any triumphalism about the defeat of Hezbollah and Hamas and the weakening of Iran will look rather hollow when set against a rampaging rabble of Sunni Islamists in Syria. Iraq too, for that country relies heavily on the support of Tehran and its affiliated Shia militia groups. And we shouldn’t forget that it was Assad who, in the early days of the Syrian Civil War, released thousands of Sunni fundamentalist prisoners across Syria, whose virulent jihadi ideologies he hoped would bring Iran and Russia to his aid as he cried wolf. The result was ISIS.
Yet it’s important to remind ourselves that HTS sees itself as a Syrian movement, albeit with Islamist roots. Its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, despite having cut his teeth in the fight against US troops in Iraq and then as an al-Qaeda affiliate, since the HTS rebranding, has been at pains to stress that he speaks for all Syrians, across religion and ethnicity. Indeed, in the past few days in Aleppo, there has been cooperation between Kurdish anti-Assad groups, and HTS. This places HTS more in the bucket of a Taliban, or a Hezbollah in that they see their struggle as contained within the borders of the state over which they are fighting. HTS, which broke with al-Qaeda in 2016 is not a transnational group. Small comfort. Especially when we remind ourselves that HTS is the dominant grouping in a coalition of Sunni-Syrian anti-Assad fighters, all of whom bear an Islamist imprint. And loose coalitions of extremists do rather tend to splinter when faced with either catastrophic success, or failure. Where, for example, does HTS go if they succeed in taking the strategically essential city of Homs, through which Iran supplies Hezbollah, and which leaves the road to Damascus open? It’s not clear.
There is always the diplomacy option. But the skeins of this conflict are so tangled that it’s difficult to see where that might begin and where it might end. Not to mention the parallel failures of democracy currently unfolding across the world. Perhaps, if we are to believe what is coming out of Tehran, with Supreme Leader Khamenei signalling (very subtly, of course) that he would be willing to negotiate with the Trump administration, that could be a start point. Perhaps, as has been suggested, Turkish President Erdogan, whose country labours under the weight of some 3 million Syrian refugees, and Assad can find common ground, all the while navigating the seemingly intractable issue of Kurdish irredentism. But with HTS smashing its way down south from Hama, time seems to be of the essence. The monstrous barbarity of the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian backers is what stands in the way of Sunni fundamentalism and a fresh round of bloodshed in Syrian, and possibly beyond. The Middle East has never felt more fragile. Unintended consequences have rarely been so costly.
Donald Trump was right about Paris
Donald Trump is in Paris today to attend the official reopening of the renovated Notre Dame cathedral. The president-elect has what could be described as a love-hate relationship with the French capital. He loves the place but it – more precisely its mayor and most of its right-on residents – hates him.
This contempt first manifested itself days after he defeated Hillary Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Hundreds of protestors took to the streets of Paris, banging pots and pans and chanting ‘No Trump, no hate, no KKK’ and ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go’. The organisers of the rally listed why they believed Trump would be bad for the world: ‘racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia, anti-Semitism, ableism, xenophobia and white nationalism’.
The situation in some quarters has deteriorated to the extent that even male residents are now frightened
Another demo was organised in November 2018, when Trump was in France to commemorate the centenary of the end of the Great War. There is also a protest planned for today, the brainchild of the pro-Palestine International Solidarity Movement.
Trump has never hidden his affection for Paris, but nor has he concealed his sorrow over its steady decline in the last decade. In December 2015, when he was the Republican presidential candidate, Trump explained why he had called for an end to all Muslim immigration to the US. ‘Look at what happened in Paris, the horrible carnage, and frankly …. Paris is no longer the same city it was.’
He was referencing the triple terror attacks of 2015, all perpetrated by Islamic extremists, which targeted Charlie Hebdo, a Jewish kosher store and the Bataclan theatre.
In February 2017, Trump again mourned the state of Paris, using a speech at the Conservative Political Action conference in Maryland to tell the audience about his friend Jim. ‘For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris,’ explained the president. But no more. ‘Paris is no longer Paris,’ Jim had told Trump.
In response, the Socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, tweeted a photo of herself with Mickey and Minnie Mouse, dedicating it to Trump and ‘Jim’, and adding: ‘We celebrate the dynamism and the spirit of openness of Paris’.
A few weeks after Hidalgo’s childish tweet, an elderly Jewish Parisian called Sarah Halimi was beaten to death by a man screaming ‘Allahu Akbar’. Less than a year later another Jewish woman, Mireille Knoll, was murdered in similar circumstances.
These were isolated incidents but the anti-Semitism that motivated them is not. Paris has arguably become the most anti-Semitic city in Europe: this century, thousands of Jews have either moved out of the city or left the country altogether. In the last year, anti-Semitic acts have soared in France by nearly 200 per cent and over half of these incidents occur in the Paris region.
It’s not just Jewish women who live in fear in the French capital. In May 2017, weeks after Hidalgo had told Trump about the spirit of openness in Paris, the city’s tabloid Le Parisien reported from a northern suburb where women were afraid to go out because of the aggression they faced from the large number of mainly migrant men.
Little has changed in the seven years since, although the situation in some quarters of the capital has deteriorated to the extent that even male residents are now frightened. A report earlier this year from the Stalingrad district discovered residents cowering in their apartments from the crack users below. ‘We can’t go out in the evenings any more, it scares us, it worries us,’ explained André. He’d complained to the town hall, the police and the Prefect, ‘but no one has replied’.
Things are now so bad in the 19th arrondissement that a well-known bank employs security guards to escort its staff from their workplace to the train station. A teacher friend of mine whose school is in the area says these guards are needed to ward off the drug addicts hassling passers-by for money.
Earlier this year, the Paris metro opened its first ‘safe space’ on the network, promoting it as a place women could alight if they felt under threat during their journey. Many do. Official figures released last week revealed that sexual violence had increased on the Paris transport system by 15 per cent in 2023.
Most of these incidents don’t make the news. These days it takes something particularly horrific to attract the attention of the media, like the brutal murder of a 19-year-old student in the Bois de Boulogne on a warm late summer’s day. The man charged with her killing is a 22-year-old Moroccan, who should have been deported after raping a young woman in 2019.
In the days after the death of Philippine, posters began appearing around Paris, bearing an image of the murdered woman along with the details about the suspect’s background. Hidalgo said the posters ‘chilled her’ because of their racist message.
Were the posters racist? Or did they simply tell the truth, in the same way Donald Trump often tells the truth, however uncomfortable it may be to a Progressive left? He was certainly right about Paris. It is no longer is the city it was.