Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectators' Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Natasha Froes and I'm joined by James Heel and Michael Stevens, who is a senior associate fellow at Roussey.

Now, over the weekend we saw the astonishing news that the rebel opposition forces in Syria had taken Damascus

and President Assad has been

granted asylum in Russia. Now, James, I'll go to you first. Talk to us about the Labour government's

response to this off the backdrop of 2013 and what Labour's historical ties are with the Syrian conflict.

Of course. So I think that really the striking thing from Westminster is how sort of peripheral the UK has been in all of this.

I think that it's mostly been sort of confusion and a sense that this has obviously taken everyone in Westminster by surprise at the speed of it,

given how permanent the regime seemed to be after 53 years of the Assad family ruling it.

This morning, Pat McFadden was the latest cabinet to go out after Angela Rainer yesterday on the media round,

and both have said they welcome the fall of Assad. Now, of course, you get some opposition of people like conservatives saying,

well, of course, you don't know what comes next. I mean, I think this is almost what you'd expect them to say,

because they can't really, they're so lacking in influence on the ground. And they're going to

be able to stopping the advance of the anti-Assad opposition with HTS. And so I think there's a couple

of things they're really focusing on right now. The first, obviously, we want to get out of the way, was Assad's wife is British,

and Pat McAfadden confirmed today that she has not been seeking asylum here

and will probably not be granted asylum for the so-called former roads of the desert.

The most depressing, I think, I think most people are dealing with in Westminster as whether HTS

now the governing authorities are going to be reclassified as not a terrorist group.

They were so-called prescribed in 2017 as an offshoot of al-Qaeda by the home office.

That looks probably likely to change in the coming weeks or so just because BATC would rather

deal with the governing authority of Syria than leave it up as a vacuum.

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