Who could fail to fall for sweet, gentle Bashar al-Assad?

He was the sweetly unassuming eye doctor who became the Accidental Dictator of Syria, and vowed to make it better. She was the gorgeous City high-flyer who shared his utopian ideals. They had nothing to declare but their genius for embracing life, liberty and each other. How could it possibly go wrong?

If Asma al-Assad asked herself this when she awoke this morning, possibly in Moscow, whither she is rumoured to have fled, who will blame her? It was all going so swimmingly for the one-time banker who signs her emails "AAA", until her triple-A rating as a champion of Syrian democracy was downgraded to the "WTF" racing through her mind today. None of it makes one whit of sense.

So here is a cautionary tale for any Sloaney young ladies dreaming of marriage to a Levantine princeling. Tall, elegant and beautiful, clad in couture clothes and Louboutin shoes, with a keen empathic intelligence for the suffering of others, you may start out as Diana, Princess of Wales. But gels, listen to your uncle Matthew, and beware: if events take an unforeseeable turn, you may end up as Mrs Ceausescu.

And heartbreakingly unforeseeable for Asma, daughter of a Syrian cardiologist, this turn of events evidently was. She grew up in the west London suburb of Acton, went to school at genteel Queen's College in Harley Street, and then took a computing science degree at King's College, London. Kings, Queens, Harley Street… call me a soppy romantic, but her love for the ophthalmologist heir to the Syrian throne was written in the stars.

Bashar al-Assad may be no Brad Pitt (of whom more below). But are we such odious cynics that the Mrs Merton question (what was it that first attracted you to the billionaire…) need be asked? No one doubted he was one of the good guys. Not after as reliable a judge of reformist Arab despots as Tony Blair took him to tea with the Queen shortly before the invasion of Iraq.

Eight years later, whether or not the old girls' network played its part, it fell to a fellow alumna of Queen's College to reveal Asma to the world. With fabulous timing, Anna Wintour chose the midst of the Arab Spring to run an adoring profile in American Vogue. It takes some finding, because the magazine pulled it from the website. But it can be located, and "Rose In the Desert", by Joan Juliet Buck, who discovered "a household run on wildly democratic lines", is a treat.

"On Friday, the Muslim day of rest," began Buck, "Asma al-Assad opens the door herself… hair in a ponytail, the word 'happiness' spelled out across the back of her T-shirt." More the evil of banality than vice versa, perhaps, but a striking image all the same. "At the bottom of the stairs stands the off-duty president in jeans - tall, long-necked, blue-eyed. A precise man… he says he was attracted to studying eye surgery 'because it's very precise, it's almost never an emergency, and…'?" yes, Bashy, old horse, spit it out, man, and what? "?'…and there is very little blood.'?"

The ironies mount as the eulogy treacles along. "You're safe because you are surrounded by people who will keep you safe," says Asma, though of course she isn't thinking of the secret police. This, after all, is the Middle East's answer to a Scandinavian bicycling monarchy, and she relates how, when Brangelina came to visit, a nervous Brad couldn't believe the lack of security when they went out for lunch. How could she have guessed there might be more security than struck the naked eye? No, she is thinking of the neighbours who, as Buck relates, "peer in, drop by… the president doesn't mind: 'This curiosity is good: they come to see you, they learn more about you. You don't isolate yourself.'?" Not, at least, until pesky insurgents drive you out of Damascus, into hiding in the family stronghold of Latakia (or, indeed, that dacha in Russia).

Buck accompanied the Assads to a children's carol service - the religious tolerance! - which morphed into a display of Arabic rap. "The president whispers, 'All of these styles belong to our culture. This is how you fight extremism - through art. This'," he presciently concludes, "is how you can have peace!'?"

If the quotes have acquired a mild poignancy since publication, even now it may not be too late for extremist-fighting art to give this tale the treatment it demands. The art in mind is the filmic oeuvre of Richard Curtis. Perhaps his wife Emma Freud, another Queen's old girl, could ask the alumna association to arrange a meeting with Asma in Moscow, where the shopping is excellent for those with numbered bank accounts, to discuss the rights. For what is this if not the archetypal Curtis romcom?

In Notting Hill it was Hugh Grant's bookseller who snared Julia Roberts's Hollywood goddess, and in Love, Actually, Martine McCutcheon's char won the heart of Grant's PM. Here we go again with Asma (Keira Knightley) playing the "What, you want me? Silly, insignificant, lil ol' me?" ingenue, and Bashar (not sure who has the looks for him: Ian Rush?) as the adored icon with the "Our-worlds-are-so-different-yet-somehow-we'll-make-it-work" shtick.

Whether the movie will be a posthumous tribute to one or both will be clear soon enough. But if ever a life-enhancing, when-worlds-collide romance screamed to be made, it is the love story of the gentle eye doctor who hates the sight of blood, and the girl from Acton who donned the Louboutins to help him usher Syria into the sunlit democratic uplands.