On 4th November, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's beleaguered president, lost his interior minister. Ali Kordan was impeached after his curriculum vitae was found to be full of lies. Most egregiously, Kordan credited himself with an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, a claim belied by a university statement denying all knowledge of him, his misspelled degree certificate and his apparent belief that Oxford University is in London.
Kordan says he was duped; he received his degree, he claims, from someone who had introduced himself as Oxford's "Tehran representative." To Iranians inclined to believe him, this exotic (but non-existent) post conjures up memories of the country's Shah-era past, when British agents plotted to embarrass and even topple Iranian governments they did not like. To conspiratorially-minded Iranians, all too aware of Britain's history of meddling in their affairs, the minister's woes have a familiar ring.
Those who suffer from this syndrome imagine Britain to be fathomlessly powerful and duplicitous, constantly striving to achieve Iran's collapse—a nation of people capable, in the Persian saying, of "cutting off your head with cotton." To a remarkable degree, this perception has survived the end of empire and the decline of Britain's global influence. No country in this age of cramped diplomatic horizons is more comforting to the British ego than Iran.
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To be a British diplomat in Tehran is to be privileged with suspicion and abhorrence. To the Tehrani in the street, Britain's power is confirmed by its ownership of two huge embassy compounds, which occupy many acres of verdant garden and are dotted with English suburban cottages. The absence of diplomats from the US, with which Iran has no diplomatic relations, means that Iranian ire at western perfidy is directed at the British embassy, whose chancery windows occasionally afford a view of stage-managed crowds burning Union Jacks and hurling rocks. Many Iranians ascribe to the British a combination of Machiavellian cunning, Metternichian realism and mystical omniscience. Far from being America's servant, Britain is often credited with duping the Americans and getting them to do its bidding. (Recent evidence includes the division of labour in occupied Iraq, where Britain assigned itself the relatively quiet south, leaving America to deal with the much tougher Sunni heartland.) When, during a round of nuclear negotiations, a British official dropped a piece of paper detailing Europe's diplomatic strategy (which was leaked to the press), clumsiness was ruled out. Iran's foreign minister speculated that the paper was dropped "on purpose."
I work as a journalist in Iran and when I tell people that I'm British, their reactions range from surprise and supercilious amusement to outright hostility. Occasionally, I feel as if I am trapped in the comic novel Uncle Napoleon. The book was written in 1971 by a Shah-era diplomat called Iraj Pezeshkzad and is set in the early 1940s, when Iran was occupied by Britain and the Soviet Union. It is full of well-drawn comic types, but none is as memorable as the eponymous paterfamilias, named for his admiration for Napoleon. For the benefit of his large, fractious family, Uncle Napoleon vaunts his youth as a gendarme, fighting British-backed miscreants and bandits early in the century. In truth, Uncle Napoleon's adversaries were a motley bunch but his imagination turns them into legions of crack British troops, whom he single-handedly kept at bay, displaying tactical acumen the equal of Napoleon's. Now that the British have taken control of Tehran, Uncle Napoleon gets it into his head that they will take revenge on him. He sleeps with a shotgun under his pillow, and accuses his faithful retainer of taking British money and plotting to kill him. Uncle Napoleon's paranoia is the book's leitmotif, conducting him first to insanity and finally death.
Banned after the Islamic revolution of 1979, presumably for its ribald dialogue and descents to schoolboy scatology, Uncle Napoleon remains beloved by many Iranians, either through bootleg offsets or, more often, DVDs of the television series it inspired. Meeting Pezeshkzad after the book came out, Amir Abbas Hoveida, Iran's pre-eminent courtier-politician of the time, asked if the character of Uncle Napoleon had been drawn from his own uncle. "It's as if," Hoveida told the author, "you'd recorded verbatim his words and expressions, and put them in the mouth of Uncle Napoleon." Pezeshkzad demurred: "There are enough Uncle Napoleons in our country to make up several Napoleonic armies, all of them products of the same school of thought."
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When I moved to Iran in 2000 I already felt burdened by the sins of my forefathers, having lived in Turkey, where Britain is disliked for its role in the break-up of the Ottoman empire, and before that in India. But nothing had prepared me for the Iranian instinct to ascribe diabolical intentions to the British. For these Iranians, I discovered, it is axiomatic that every Persian-speaking Brit—there are not many of us—must be a spy. And the more an Iranian public figure fulminates against the British, the more he is assumed to be covering his tracks, and to be one of the British "lackeys" who have, over the past two centuries, betrayed their country for British favours. Above all, there is a sense that Britain, whatever its status in the world, remains spitefully determined to interfere in Iranian affairs. (This is how many Iranians view Britain's trenchant opposition to Iran's nuclear programme.) Once, having telephoned a famous Iranian author for the innocent purpose of asking her a question about one of her books, I heard her whisper to someone in the room with her, "When will these British leave us alone?"
During the early period of contact between the two nations, in the 17th century, the opulence of the Persian court provoked envy and amazement on the part of the British. By the late 19th century, however, as Britain and Russia vied for influence over the feeble Qajar dynasty, admiration had given way to contempt. In his great national survey Persia and the Persian Question, the young George Nathaniel Curzon described a court elite presiding with "splendour and frippery" over a land of exquisite eastern torpor, excelling only at corruption.
Britain, Russia and other European countries encouraged successive Qajar Shahs to take out loans, and won lucrative trade concessions. This alarmed those Iranians, including progressive clerics and merchants, who advocated the limiting of the sovereign's powers and the consolidation of popular sovereignty in a parliament. For a while, Britain, in contrast to Tsarist Russia, did not oppose the demands of the constitutionalists, and in the summer of 1906, some 1,200 of them were given sanctuary in the grounds of the British embassy—a quaint congregation of mullahs and their supporters, fed from massive cauldrons, debating the merits of constitutional rule as guests of the world's pre-eminent constitutional monarchy. Under great pressure, the Shah reluctantly granted the protestors their parliament.
Britain's support for the constitutionalists soon withered. The Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, under which Britain and Russia divided Iran into two spheres of influence, was negotiated and signed without Iranian knowledge, and caused immense ill-will. The Russians now intervened decisively in the still-unresolved struggle between the constitutionalists and the Shah. In 1907 they bombarded parliament on royal orders, and they later carried out massacres in the constitutionalist stronghold of Tabriz.
It was Curzon, as foreign secretary, who definitively established Britain's reputation among Iranians for deception. The agreement that he reached with Iran in 1919, when post-revolutionary Russia was briefly absent from foreign affairs, would have turned Iran into a British protectorate in all but name. Negotiated in secret, the agreement was denounced in Iran as a sellout, and its Iranian sponsors as traitors. The deal was never ratified, and patriotic Iranians interpreted subsequent events in the light of Britain's alleged resolve to get even.
Over the decades that followed the reminiscences of British diplomats in Tehran are full of allusions to the collective distrust that Iranians felt for Britain, and their attribution to the British of extraordinary powers—quite different from their feelings towards the Soviets, who, while violent and brutal, at least seemed guileless. Iran's royal houses were not immune from the fever. The rise from obscurity of a Cossack officer called Reza Khan, who founded the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925, was universally (and probably accurately) ascribed to the British; Reza, in turn, conceived a quite irrational fear that his own son, Crown Prince Muhammad-Reza, was a British spy. Reza Shah's decree forcing Iranian women to give up the veil, compromising their Muslim purity; the rise and fall of public reputations; even the marriage, in 1939, of the Crown Prince to an Egyptian princess; these and other occurrences were ascribed to the "old lion," Britain, and its Iranian servants.
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In the susceptibility of Iranians to "Uncle Napoleonism"—whereby the sufferer sees the hidden hand of the British behind all events—one may diagnose an abdication of responsibility and a pretext for the sort of historical determinism that encourages inertia in public life. But the actions of the British, and their treatment of Iran as a dependency to be first tamed and then milked, suggest that the Iranian view has some basis in truth. In 1941, Reza Shah was deposed by the British in collaboration with the Russians, ostensibly for being too pro-German. Over the next decade, as his successor Muhammad-Reza struggled to assert authority over a revived parliament, Britain continued to manoeuvre prime ministers in and out of power; one British ambassador referred to the parliamentary opposition as "our opposition." But Iran was stirring, and nationalist sentiment eventually brought to office a brilliant figure determined to reorder Iranian politics on the basis of national independence and popular sovereignty: Muhammad Mossadegh.
An urbane, European-educated champion of democracy and constitutional monarchy, Mossadegh regarded national self-determination as compromised by the British, as incarnated in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The AIOC enjoyed a monopoly over the exploitation and sale of Iran's prime resource. The huge refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf coast was Britain's biggest overseas asset: itself a small empire, its internal workings stinking of racial discrimination, its account books shielded from the Iranian government. For Mossadegh and his supporters, it would be preferable for Iran to forego its royalties from the sale of oil rather than continue to accept the loss of sovereignty implicit in this arrangement. In the spring of 1951, he steered through parliament legislation to nationalise the AIOC, and shortly after, to popular acclaim, was swept to power as prime minister.
In Britain, bruised already by the break-up of its empire, the press howled. As the Iranian flag rose over the refinery at Abadan, and Mossadegh's popularity soared across what would soon be known as the third world, Attlee's Labour government feared that "Mossadeghism" would spread and jeopardise Britain's other strategic assets, particularly the Suez Canal. Mossadegh was denounced with a vitriol formerly reserved for that earlier anti-colonialist, Mahatma Gandhi. One senior diplomat, who had, in any case, a low opinion of the "Oriental character," likened the Iranian prime minister to a "cab horse."
Now, in the decolonising 1950s, Britain tried to stop the clock. At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Ann Lambton, a formidable Persian grammarian who had worked as a propagandist in wartime Iran, advised that Mossadegh should be ousted. For much of 1951 and 1952, from the British embassy in Tehran, a group of MI6 and diplomatic officers, Persian-speakers for the most part, explored the possibility of toppling the prime minister. They sounded out the Shah, who loathed Mossadegh, and, using bribes and threats, they cultivated assets in society and the bazaar. Meanwhile, hopes for a diplomatic solution, never very high, foundered on Mossadegh's refusal to back down on the principle of nationalisation, and the determination of Winston Churchill's new Conservative government to right what it regarded as a historic "wrong."
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The coup d'état that finally toppled Mossadegh, in August 1953, was carried out by the CIA. Mossadegh, alive to British plotting, had broken off bilateral relations and expelled Britain's diplomats and spies the previous year. In inspiration, however, the coup was British. Britain had persuaded America that Mossadegh was a cat's paw for the communists, and that he or his leftist allies would drive Iran into the Soviet orbit. The danger, as later scholars have shown, and one of the CIA coup-makers has hinted, was greatly exaggerated, but the British knew which American button to push. And so an intervention coloured by pique, delusion and racial arrogance was presented as a blow against communism.
The coup did not arrest Britain's decline. The British were forced to accept US participation in an international consortium that was set up to run Iran's oil industry; by the end of the decade they had ceded to the US their pre-eminent position in Iranian affairs. Mossadeghism, too, continued to spread, even if its author languished in an Iranian jail. In July 1956, Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal, and this time America obliged the British to withdraw and accept the fait accompli. It was clear to all that British prestige had suffered an irreparable blow.
To all, that is, but the Iranians. The myth of British power survived America's long Iranian heyday, an era of military and economic co-operation that allowed the Shah to exercise a vindictive despotism over his people. The Shah himself, having been brought to power by the British in place of his father, never lost his fear and resentment of his old sponsors. As the 1979 revolution approached, Iran's ambassador to London spent much time conveying the monarch's displeasure at what were regarded, in Iran, as the BBC's pro-revolutionary broadcasts, and at Private Eye's disconcerting practice of referring to the King of Kings as the "Shit of Persia." After 1979, many disappointed monarchists suggested that the revolution had been got up by the British, jealous at being supplanted by the Americans in Iranian affairs. Even now, some opponents of the Islamic Republic persist in claiming that the British, despite occasional shows of animosity to the Islamic Republic, are actually in cahoots with the ruling clerics. Such is the nature of Uncle Napoleonism; it surpasses reality.
In eight years of living in Tehran, I have only once been able to exploit Uncle Napoleonism to my advantage. I have an old leather briefcase which I took for repair to a bag-maker in a street near the British embassy. When I went to pick it up, the bag-maker said that I would have to pay double his original quote. I objected, but he stood firm. He would return my case only if I paid him the higher price.
Furious, I leaned across the counter and looked into the bag-maker's eyes. Then, pointing to the Union Jack outside, I said in as menacing a voice as I could muster, "It seems you have forgotten which embassy stands there at the top of your street."
It took a second or two for the bag-maker to register the threat. Then the colour drained from his cheeks. "Alright!" he said, "Alright! Give me whatever you want! Just take your briefcase and go!"
