The real Iran – and the reasons why it’s one of the most paradoxical countries in the world Millions of Iranians lead double lives. It’s no surprise when their government is so unusual, explains former foreign secretary Jack Straw

On the surface, in Tehran and other cities of Iran, all may appear calm, orderly and devout. Women wear their headscarves, as required by law; the devout turn up in their thousands to religious ceremonies.

Just below the surface, though, Iran is far from calm. The hardline, religious regime – which took control after the popular uprising against the Shah in 1979 and has held the real power in the country ever since – is going one way, the majority of the population the other.

During my time as foreign secretary, I became fascinated, bewitched, infuriated and perplexed by this singular country. I strived to understand it better, and have done ever since, as I explain in my new book, The English Job.

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In 2001, I was the first British foreign secretary to visit the country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and have visited many times since.

Its people, with few exceptions, are delightful. They are possessed of the greatest of gifts, of imagination, inventiveness, a great sense of their literature and culture, a passion for poetry. I count many Iranians as my friends – and so I have learnt that many appear to be one thing in public but are quite another in private.

The secret lives of the Persian people

Walk around any big city, for example, and observe closely. The headscarves on many women, middle-aged as well as young, are pushed back as far as possible, in insolent defiance to the old men who lay down how women should dress.

Under a loose coat they may be wearing the tightest of tight jeans, and the women’s eyes and faces are heavily made-up. In a population that ranks 19th in the world, Iran’s consumption of make-up ranks seventh.

This defiance can bring these women into conflict with the official “morality police” which ensures compliance with the rules. In three months in 2014, for example, 220,000 women were taken to a police station to sign statements promising the proper use of the headscarf, and 8,269 were detained, according to the Ministry of the Interior.

Alcohol is banned. Yet it is so widely available – much of it homemade – that, according to The Economist, amongst majority Muslim countries, Iran is behind only Lebanon and Turkey, where its sale and consumption is legal, in per person usage.

TV and radio in Iran are strictly controlled, while the state filters the internet and blocks social media sites – not that this has stopped the Supreme Leader himself from occasionally using his own Twitter account.

Despite the risks, millions of Iranians use their ingenuity to get around this censorship. More open access to the internet is secured through virtual private networks; fly over any town and see the roofs festooned with illegal satellite dishes. BBC Persian is watched by 11 million people, and millions more watch other foreign TV channels.

The state claimed that it confiscated 270,000 satellite dishes in 2015, but it is losing the battle.

Even though it is an Islamic republic, there’s also been a decline in the numbers attending mosques regularly. “People laugh at all the nonsense the mullahs are telling them,” says Darioush Bayandor, a former Iranian diplomat.

The result is a country that is full of paradoxes; a mass of contradictions.

It’s little wonder that as many as 150,000 educated Iranians leave the country each year – people who could be contributing to its development.

So what’s behind this oppression? And why have the people been unable to break free?

Iran’s real leader

Just as there’s a difference between the public and private lives of the Iranian people, there’s also a difference between the politicians they vote for and the people who actually control the country.

The real president of the Islamic Republic is not the elected Hassan Rouhani, who will leave office in 2021, but Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, effectively president for life.

Every one of the coercive powers of the state – the police, the judiciary, the intelligence agencies, the army, the Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guard – is vested in the Supreme Leader. Elected ministers have no role, and parts of the system are almost out of control.

This causes huge rivalries, as my wife and I experienced on our holiday in the country in October 2015. We had to be protected by the Iranian police – not from terrorists, but from another arm of the state, the Basij militia. I can think of no other country in the world where that occurs, save Iran.

“I had a bodyguard from the normal police,” one of our former diplomats who had served in Iran told me, “protecting me from their own side”.

What Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case shows us

The story of the dual British-Iranian national, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, is a much worse example of this division. She has been detained in Iranian jails since April 2016, sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for allegedly plotting against the regime. She was on a family visit at the time.

British ministers and diplomats have tried hard to secure her release, but they can talk only to officials within the elected Rouhani government.

Rouhani can plead with Khamenei, and those running the judiciary, for clemency. In response, Khamenei and the deep state can ignore such pleas, as they routinely do.

As Foreign Minister Javad Zarif explained: ‘We in the government have no control over the judiciary.”

All properly functioning democracies have a judicial system which is at arm’s length from the executive. But in true democracies, the police, the armed forces and the intelligence agencies are all subject to active supervision by elected parliaments and ministers. Such control is wholly absent in Iran.

It’s no wonder that Rouhani reportedly told reformist figures at a party in May 2019: “The government has no authority in foreign politics, doesn’t know where/when it is allowed or not to negotiate, Cultural policies, IRIB state TV, mosques and cyberspace aren’t under government control.”

Nobody is safe

Even senior politicians can suffer at the hands of those who really hold power.

Two loyal servants of the revolution, and candidates in the 2009 election – Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi – have been under house arrest since 2011; some reactionary MPs have even called for their execution. Their “crimes”? Campaigning for a more liberal Iran.

Former president Mohammad Khatami has been declared a “non-person”. He cannot travel abroad, and the media have been prohibited from reporting his words or publishing his photograph because of his support for Mousavi and Karroubi.

When he was first elected, Rouhani indicated that he would help secure Mousavi’s and Karroubi’s release. Six years later, they remain under arrest.

Keep it in the family

There is, however, one group in Iran which does not have to go to the same lengths as ordinary people to evade the rigid codes of the Islamic Republic. These are families of the elite who run the country. They are known, sarcastically, as the “aghazadeh”, or “noble-born”.

One of the charges against the rule of the Shahs was that the country was run by a thousand families who enriched themselves at the expense of the poor. The first Supreme Leader, Ruhollah Khomeini – also known in the Western world as Ayatollah Khomeini – insisted that all should lead modest lives.

Now, however, the thousand families close to the royal households have been replaced by those families close to the power centres of the Islamic Republic.

The aghazadeh have little shame about posting photographs of themselves on Instagram. Thus, the son of the retired General Saeed Tolouei of the Revolutionary Guard is shown posing with a pet tiger, driving a Cadillac and throwing a lavish party for his two-year-old daughter.

During a recent visit to London, Khomeini’s great-granddaughter, Yasaman Eshraghi, posted a picture of herself with a $3,800 (£3,100) Dolce & Gabbana handbag, alongside a BMW.

Khomeini’s great-grandson, Ahmad Khomeini, a 21-year-old cleric, was pictured at an equestrian club wearing fashionable imported gear.

Mohammad-Reza Sobhani, the son of a former Iranian ambassador to Venezuela, “systematically uploads photos of himself enjoying champagne at the pool, occasionally with naked women in the background”, the Arab Weekly has reported. “Other photos show him driving a Bugatti and lighting his cigarettes with dollar bills.”

No one in Iran believes that all this wealth could have been acquired lawfully. They are indications of not just financial but also moral corruption, which is eating away at the legitimacy of the regime from the inside.

Memories of foreign interference

Iranians have good reasons for feeling sensitive about the way they have been treated by other, more powerful, nations in the past, including by the British.

In the past century the UK occupied the country for five years from 1941-46, and has overthrown Iran’s Ieaders and installed new ones. It backed the Shah’s own oppressive regime. And it secretly supplied Iraq’s Saddam Hussein with weapons after he invaded Iran in 1980, beginning a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. There’s no collective memory in the UK about our actions. There is in Iran.

Unfortunately, the history of foreign interference in Iran is used by the governing elite to justify the regime’s repression and intolerance. But what of the future? There’s a wide spectrum of opinion in the country about where Iran should go next and how Iranians should live their lives, even if it can’t be discussed openly.

“Tehran today reminds me of Prague or Budapest in the 1980s,” one British diplomat who had served both in the Eastern bloc and in Iran told me. “There’s an uneasiness; the conversations behind cupped hands; and the appreciation that something is going to have to give.”

But what will give first?

Looking to the future

Khamenei is 79. He is not in good health. Whenever he ceases to be Supreme Leader, those around him, and those dependent on his authority, particularly the Revolutionary Guard, will strive hard to retain their enormous wealth and power.

For the future, we could see more of the same. If there were serious unrest, there could be the institution of a military dictatorship.

Alternatively, we could see Iran start down the road towards more open and democratic institutions. Some within the country have already been brave enough to call for such change.

The more that reformists can point to the benefits to Iran of cooperating with the world outside, the more empowered they will be, and the less and less convincing will be the hardliners’ position to their own people.

Mistakes on both sides

Iran is a proud country and intensely nationalistic. It cries out for respect and recognition in the international community.

It was this desire that led to the election of Rouhani and Iran’s agreement with the US, the UK and other foreign powers in 2015 to curtail its nuclear programme. If, in late 2016, a Democrat had been elected to the White House, the deal would have stuck.

Instead, Donald Trump has abandoned the deal – a reckless move that has already made the world a more dangerous place, strengthened the most hardline voices inside the regime, and increased China’s influence over Iran.

The effects of Trump’s sanctions US sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have limited Iran’s ability to import products from abroad in recent months, leading to high inflation. Families have been badly affected by increased food costs. Beef has gone from 380,000 rials (£8) a kilo three months ago to nearly 1.2 million rials, according to CNBC, while pasta has quadrupled in price and canned tuna is nearly eight times what it was. Subsidies and price regulations have been used by the government in Tehran to limit the effects. One family inside the country tells i that they hope that the initial economic shock is over and things are stabilising.

The government in Tehran, sensitive to the needs and opinions of its people and wanting to end Iran’s self-imposed isolation and economic suffering, could take unilateral steps in its own interests, to reset its defence and security doctrine to concentrate on the measures required to protect Iran’s territorial integrity, and abandon its focus on the hopeless aim of eliminating Israel as a state.

But that depends in turn on whether Iran is capable of domestic political reform to wrest control of all its coercive forces from the unaccountable deep state to an elected government.

The international community can help or hinder internal moves for reform – not by the covert methods it resorted to in the past with such disastrous consequences, but by understanding and honouring Iran and its people, working to end its isolation, and speaking out against the continuing excesses of the regime.

This is an edited excerpt from ‘The English Job: Understanding Iran And Why It Distrusts Britain’ by Jack Straw (£20, Biteback)