Diana of Syria

The London girl with a plan to save Syria - Times Online

She visited the family home in Homs, western Syria, every year and even in London they lived a very “Syrian” existence. She once joked that she was “about seven” before she realised her parents could speak English. “If you were to ask me what I miss most about London, it would probably be the rain,” she says.

Still, for a woman who had known the freedom of growing up in Britain and having her own career, the prospect of marrying Assad must have been a daunting one, entailing constraints of protocol and security, even for a free spirit like herself.

She says she decided she was not taking on a symbolic position, but a job. “Two weeks ago my husband and I went to see a play at the theatre. The following day, during a meeting, somebody new to Syria asked if that was normal. What’s abnormal about it? We’re married, we’re young, why wouldn’t we go to the theatre? He said, ‘Because heads of state just don’t do that’. That’s the difference between letting the position dictate who you are as a person or you determining who you are as an individual. The first lady is what I do, it is not who I am.”

What she doesn’t say is that both she and the president were in jeans, had not booked tickets and, finding the stalls were full, sat upstairs in the gods. It has been the talk of Damascus for a fortnight.

In person she is perfectly groomed, willowy and model slim. This month’s French Elle rates her as the most stylish of international political ladies (above Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Michelle Obama). At the mention of this she rolls her eyes. Being thought a style icon clearly amuses her, although her claim that she chooses clothes for comfort rather than fashion is ever so slightly undermined by the vertiginous heels – the scarlet soles betray them as Christian Louboutin – that she wears to visit the education centre.

The Assads have two sons – Hafez, 7, and Kareem, 3 – plus a five-year-old daughter, Zein, and live in an apartment block on a hill overlooking Damascus. The day we met was Hafez’s birthday. They’d had a morning celebration at home before school but the main event would be a football party this weekend, which she would be forced to join in. “I’m the goalie!” she laughs.

“He wants to be an astronaut, so we’re in a space mode at the moment. I don’t know much about space but I’m learning very quickly.”

After dropping the children at school each day, she heads for her office, a cool, airy building overlooking the city. It’s there that we meet, although this is not entirely to her liking: “If I’d had it my way, I would have invited you out for a cup of coffee.”

All this glossy informality, of course, is at odds with Syria’s more familiar image as a sinister dictatorship and pariah state, a key ally of Iran and Hezbollah and an enemy of Israel and the United States.