Politics

The liberation of Syria’s notorious Sednaya jail close to Damascus a week ago has resulted in a wave of belated outrage in much western media toward the former dictator and his methods. For Syria watchers, there is something rather surreal about this late discovery of the methods of Assad’s regime. Some of the precise numbers remain disputed. There is, as yet, no independent verification of the statement by Mouaz Mustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, that the mass grave at al-Qutayfah contains the remains of at least 100,000 people. The task of piecing together the precise dimensions of the Assad regime’s crimes against the Syrian people, and crucially

Every year, Vladimir Putin gives a marathon town hall event that lasts for hours. Every year, I feel compelled to watch. Every year, I wonder if it will be the last time I do, as these have become increasingly formulaic, but there is always something in them that rewards watching. (Or so I tell myself.) It was briefly tempting to write this ahead of time, because by now the format and content has become thoroughly predictable Originally, there were two such events a year: a mammoth end-of-year press conference and then ‘Direct Line,’ a kind of online town hall at which Putin addresses a selection of questions (more than two

Close your eyes in today’s Liaison Committee hearing and you might have thought Rishi Sunak was still prime minister. Keir Starmer clearly shares his predecessor’s enthusiasm for this end-of-term parliamentary ritual. His smile was broad and his hands flurried as he relished the chance to show off his knowledge in front of two dozen select committee chairs. Gone are the days of the Boris Johnson era when such exchanges were characterised by mutual loathing. Such was Labour’s performance in July’s general election that the party now boasts two thirds of the select committee chairs. The likes of Meg Hillier and Liam Byrne were robust, but hardly intimidating, as Starmer handled