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Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with me,

Rory Stewart. And with me, Alistair Campbell.

And you're about to listen to an interview that Roy and I did a few days ago in Damascus, in the Palace of the People, as Bashar al-Assad, insisted on calling it, which is now occupied by a man that many of you will know as

Al Jalani, but actually is called now President Ahmed al-Shara. And a really, really interesting

interview. We ended up having longer with him than we expected to.

It came about because one of his people had heard Rory and I talking about him on the podcast

and we'd said that we'd love to interview him and then they got in touch through the foreign

ministry and we then met the foreign minister in Davos, talked about when and how we might get there

and do the interview, flew to Beirut, got driven to Damascus, and then after a long way,

while he was in Saudi Arabia seeing Mohammed bin Salman and others up to the palace at 1030, started

the interview at 10 at night, and we left there roughly just before 1 o'clock. I'd been there

before when Assad was empowered, say the security even greater in terms of the ins and outs and

...