The girl who saved Paris

Putin’s “gilded cage” for exiled despots

Bashar al-Assad has been granted asylum in Moscow on – somewhat ironic – “humanitarian grounds”, says Mark Galeotti in The Spectator. And the life Vladimir Putin is offering is a “rather opulent one”, if you don’t mind joining one of the world’s most rarefied zoos: “Putin’s collection of ex-dictators”, all cooped up in the village of Barvikha, a little way west of Moscow. From the road it’s unremarkable, but as you turn into the side streets you notice the oddly grand dachas behind high walls and “ornate but very functional” metal gates. In Soviet times this was home to loyal apparatchiks. Today it houses a selection of toppled tyrants and their loved ones.

There is the family of the late Slobodan Milošević, deposed Serbian president and war criminal. There are no fewer than three former presidents: Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan, overthrown by the 2005 “Tulip Revolution”; Aslan Abashidze of Georgia’s Ajarian Autonomous Republic (convicted in absentia on terrorism and murder charges in his native country); and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled following the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity”. Bashar and Asma al-Assad are presumed to be the latest additions. It will be interesting to see how they get on in the “most tastelessly gilded cage of all”. The houses are massive (Yanukovych’s is said to be worth £41m), and the village offers overpriced oligarch-style restaurants and shopping. At Barvikha Luxury Village, for example, “you can pick up a Ferrari in your new Ermenegildo Zegna outfit”. They will have to pay for this of course, as well as for their own security and household staff, many likely to be agents of the FSB. But, like any self-respecting dictator, Assad is bound to have salted away funds (£1.6bn by one estimate) just in case.

The Red Queen’s war on nimbys

None of them will admit it, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph, but many – “perhaps most” – Tory MPs will be cheering on Labour housing secretary Angela Rayner next week. She’s doing what they long dreamed of: “taking the fight to nimbys”. The “Red Queen” has given every council in England a mandatory housebuilding quota (4,300 houses a year for Derbyshire, for example, double the old target) and promised new powers to bypass planning committees. “I love it,” says one former Tory housing secretary. “She’s doing what we should have done years ago.” The trouble is, nimbys may not be the problem.

What few people realise is that the country’s 11 biggest housebuilders have more than a million plots in their land-banks already (around half of which have planning permission). The reason they aren’t building faster is that the market is dominated by a small cartel of huge firms, who collude to constrain the supply of houses to make sure prices don’t fall. That’s why so many new properties are ugly and shoddily built – the big developers, protected from competition by outdated regulations, know they can get away with cutting corners. The whole point of building more houses is to make it more affordable to buy a house – precisely what these building firms are studiously preventing. Far better than “taking on the nimbys” would be cutting regulation to encourage new housebuilders to compete, offering buyers a better range of options and forcing the big players to up their game. It’s important Rayner wins this battle. It’s even more important that “she fights the right one”.