In 2021, 21-year-old musician Dylan Rocha collapsed in his bathroom. Unaware that the heroin he received in the post was tainted with a potent synthetic opioid, he became unresponsive and was soon pronounced dead. Rocha’s tragic death is believed to be one of the first in Britain linked to a nitazene – substances that can be up to 500 times stronger than heroin. Rocha’s case is not an isolated incident. Three years later, it stands as part of an alarming pattern of overdose deaths involving nitazenes across the country. They have been detected in every region of England, as well as in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. On the streets, users play a dangerous game of Russian roulette, often unaware that ...

Uncomfortable though it is to acknowledge, now is a very good time for Reform UK. One recent poll put the party ahead of Labour and it is only marginally behind the Conservatives. There have been a few notable Tory defections in former MP Andrea Jenkyns and ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie, and, inevitably, talk of more to come. And immigration is in the news following the announcement that net migration for the previous two years reached 1.6 million people. Perhaps, above all, events in the US have given Nigel Farage and his party a boost. Farage’s friendship with president-elect Donald Trump gives the Reform leader the ability to speak with authority on US policy and the opportunity to create mischief. His links ...

Moscow may have granted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad asylum on “humanitarian grounds”. But he will never truly be safe again. When leaders like Assad have their backs against the wall, they have an impossible decision to make. Do they try to shoot their way out of the problem, or do they decide to flee? Usually, they choose the former. In large part, that’s because finding the right place to hide away is all but impossible. Assad’s regime has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Many millions were forced to flee. As evidenced by the rapid advance of the rebels that toppled this bloodthirsty tyrant, much of the population hates him, and that hatred didn’t disappear the moment he slipped out the ...

A new political chapter has opened in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, where he has been granted asylum. And the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani, the nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, has captured Damascus, barely ten days after launching its offensive on 27 November.   Brace for numerous theories about why Assad’s regime fell suddenly, with little more than a whimper, and even claims that its downfall was inevitable. In truth, no one predicted HTS’s lightning advance from its redoubts in the north-western province of Idlib, adjacent to Turkey – not Assad, not Iran and Russia, his principal patrons, perhaps not even Al-Jolani himself. The House of Assad was built in ...

Assassinations are the perfect fuel for conspiracy theories. So you might think Wednesday’s (4 December) fatal shooting in New York of Brian Thompson, CEO of the huge US firm UnitedHealthcare, would prompt exactly that reaction. And sure enough, dark mutterings soon appeared about whether it was a professional “hit”, and who was behind it. Did it relate to allegations that Thompson had been involved in insider trading? Or was he about to reveal something about vaccines? But on social media in the hours after the story broke, the overwhelming response was not convoluted theories, but something simpler: rage. On X and BlueSky, the immediate assumption was that the murder was revenge for the suffering of a relative denied adequate healthcare. The ...

In the early days of Covid, people lost it. Not a few people; most people. I remember an anarchist friend telling me we should do what the Spanish were doing, and send tanks on to the street to police our house arrest. Within a few months, he was breaking the law to attend illegal raves. A few years on, and almost nobody is willing to own up to the authoritarian spasm that seized us in those first febrile weeks. I believe support for recent governments’ immigration policy was another such spasm. Sensible people are quickly forgetting that they ever thought the arrival of nearly a million people (as the recently released net migration figures show occurred last year) was anything other ...

This was a speech about definition. As the Prime Minister took to the podium at the iconic Pinewood Studios just outside London, the stakes felt more like those of a government two thirds into its term rather than close to the start. Five months after Labour won a historic election victory with a one-word slogan of “change”, there remains confusion and disappointment about what exactly the government stands for. There have been several attempts by Keir Starmer to set a clearer message – his gloomy speech in the Downing Street garden in August, his more hopeful, passionate address at Labour Party conference in Liverpool in September – but the slumping polls suggest these have been insufficient. The government has struggled to ...

Following the 1963 attempt on his life that would later be depicted in the film The Day of the Jackal, Charles de Gaulle was considering his own future, and that of his political project. He put a referendum to the French people asking them to approve a reform that would mean the president was elected directly via universal suffrage rather than by an electoral college system. A vote of no confidence was put forward by the representatives in the Assembly who felt snubbed by the demand to bypass them. Georges Pompidou’s government fell, so De Gaulle dissolved parliament, won the legislative elections and his referendum passed. No such options are available to Emmanuel Macron whose government, led by Michel Barnier, was ...