SARAH VINE: There’s a particular place in Hell for individuals like Mrs Assad. I hope the satan is retaining a seat heat for her

She could have done so much good; she could have improved the lives of millions of Syrians; she could have used her influence to transform a part of the world where women’s rights are at best shaky, at worst non-existent.

But Asma al-Assad chose a different path. As her husband’s henchmen flayed their victims alive in the torture chambers of the notorious Sednaya prison, she clothed herself in designer labels. As Bashar murdered his citizens with chemical weapons, she shopped for expensive fripperies at Harrods. As the children of those deemed ‘enemies’ of the regime were left orphans, her three wanted for nothing.

Now she and her family are believed to be in Moscow, safe and sound, enjoying the fruits of their tyranny, insulated by their embezzled millions (some of which comes from stolen humanitarian aid siphoned off by Asma via her bogus charities) and protected by their dictator chum Vladimir Putin. They’ve been joined by her parents, Fawaz and Sahar Akhras, who until recently lived in Acton, west London.

I wonder, do Bash and Vlad compare notes over their Champagne and oysters about the relative merits of sarin gas and cluster bombs? Do Asma and Alina Kabaeva, Putin’s alleged gymnast girlfriend who is 30 years his junior, do Pilates together? Does Fawaz, once a respected cardiologist, commiserate with his son-in-law about his recent setbacks?

After the Second World War, witnessing the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief implementors of the Holocaust, the Jewish writer and thinker Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe his unsettling ordinariness. She was struck by Eichmann’s lack of charisma, intelligence or purpose. He was living proof that evil is more common, more everyday than we think, and that the most unlikely people can commit the most terrible acts without giving them a second thought.

We expect evil to look and sound nefarious, like in the movies: a menacing swagger, a threatening word, an ugly flash of temper. But very often it’s none of those things. It comes without warning, when you least expect it, from the least likely places.

Asma al-Assad could have done so much good; she could have improved the lives of millions of Syrians, writes SARAH VINE

Asma and Bashar al-Assad meet the Queen in 2002. Later, as the henchmen of Asma’s husband flayed their victims alive, she clothed herself in designer labels

Dominique Pelicot, the man currently on trial in France for drugging his wife, Gisele, and then inviting numerous strangers to rape her while he filmed it, is a classic case. Just an ordinary bloke, getting together with a load of other ordinary blokes to commit unspeakable crimes. It’s the humdrum lives of those accused – a soldier, a nurse, a lorry driver – that makes that case so shocking.

Asma al-Assad falls into that same category, as does her husband. Bashar has never possessed the kind of face one normally associates with a violent strongman: he has a weak, receding chin, a gangly puny body. He looks more suited to his original career choice, an ophthalmologist, than to the role of despot.

He certainly managed to fool some people. The BBC’s John Simpson has described him as ‘weak rather than wicked’, adding that ‘in person, I found him meek and anxious to please – the reverse of the traditional dictator’. Like Eichmann, Bashar never seemed as though he had it in him. But he did: 13 years of brutal conflict, almost 600,000 dead. Hardly most people’s definition of ‘meek’.

Murder and torture were Bashar’s birthright; he was born into a brutal dynasty, his father Hafez already notorious for the 1982 Hama massacre and numerous other crimes. But Asma is different. She followed her own path. She could have lived any life she wanted; instead, she chose this.

That’s what makes her so especially repugnant, maybe even more so than her chinless dictator husband. Here is a woman who grew up in an ordinary English suburb, went to private school and university in London, worked in finance in New York and the City. Her parents were middle-class professionals, her home a terraced house with bay windows.

She could barely have had a more civilised start. Every opportunity, every advantage of a young woman living in a liberal democracy. And yet she chose to marry a despot and support him in running his murderous regime.

If Bashar really were as weak as everyone claimed, ‘as anxious to please’ as Simpson so naively believed, then she could have used her influence to steer him towards a different path. Instead, she appears to have done the opposite, revelling in the status and power and even boasting, in emails leaked in 2012, that she was ‘the real dictator’ in their household.

That, to me, is the worst kind of evil. One not born out of pain, misfortune or misunderstanding, not driven by ideology or ambition or revenge – but just a simple, small-minded kind of selfishness, evil for the sake of evil. That’s the kind the Devil enjoys the most. I hope he’s keeping a seat warm for her in Hell.