As the Metropolitan Police quickly discovered, the headscarf-grabber was Bahar Mahroo, a social media personality and controversial member of the Persian diaspora. The day of Iran’s presidential election, she and other foes of the ayatollah prowled the streets around the embassy, assaulting or otherwise abusing those compatriots casting their votes in what the opposition see as an illegal regime’s “circus” election. “You voting is the same as dipping your finger in the blood of the youths of our homeland!” proclaimed one member of the so-called “Embarrassment Campaign” as he castigated a young lady carrying a Gail’s cup.

This farce epitomises the hopelessness of Iran’s exiled opposition. “Embarrassment” stunts remain in vogue, and animate dinner-table conversations for days. But ask an activist what they really achieve and they’d be hard-pressed to answer. Split into an array of factions, the diaspora harbours several distinct visions for the future. Glossing over their foreign homes, they patronisingly tell compatriots how they should behave, even as they unceasingly bicker among themselves. Yet most of what they actually do is unpleasant, unedifying — and ultimately pointless. 

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Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been challenged by a constellation of dissident groups. Indulged by wealthy funders, all keen to bring the ayatollah down, forecasts of the regime’s imminent collapse ceaselessly flow from Persian-language TV networks in London and Los Angeles. That the status quo is untenable is, after all, a foregone conclusion. There is no doubt about the Islamic Republic’s undemocratic nature, its gender apartheid, its muzzled press, or its aggressive support for Shi’a nationalism at home and militant proxies abroad. 

Yet if many overseas Iranians agree that the ayatollahs must go, why have they utterly failed to accelerate the ousting of the clerics in Tehran? The answer partly lies in their own internal divisions. For if the expats are united in loathing the Islamic Republic, they violently disagree on what should come next. 

Consider, for instance, the pro-monarchy camp. Straddling a range of ideological and cultural backgrounds — from atheists and liberal Muslims to alienated supporters of the Islamic Republic — they harbour nostalgic visions of reinstating the deposed Pahlavi dynasty. Their attention typically focuses on Reza Pahlavi, who currently lives in Virginia but is imagined to someday return to Iran and reclaim his father’s throne. From there, the royalists hope to recover the glories of ancient Persia. Drawing on documents such as the Cyrus Cylinder, a cuneiform legal tablet from the 6th century BC, they envision an Iran of universal human rights and joyous festive rituals. That’s echoed by praise for Zoroastar, the ancient prophet and founder of Iran’s traditional pre-Islamic faith.

Their exaggerated use of Zoroastrian symbols obviously doesn’t necessarily mean the monarchists subscribe to the triple tenets of “good thoughts, good words and good deeds” laid out by Zoroaster. Nor does it mean that they particularly care about spirituality in general. Rather, such iconography appeals to them as symbols of Persia’s glorious past. It goes without saying, of course, that these conceptions are utterly eclipsed by the realities of modern Iran, a country of 85 million people wobbling between Shi’ite conservatism and the rising secular thirst for modernity. It hardly helps, moreover, that many royalists haven’t returned to their native land in decades, leaving them physically as well as psychologically unmoored from the Iran of today.

Not that they’re the only ones to harbour fantastical ideas about the country. There remains, after all, a liberal opposition to the Islamic Republic. They envision a replica of French democracy being built in Iran. Their unofficial chieftains are social media influencers, artists and exiled athletes. One example is Masih Alinejad, a celebrated activist who’s spoken everywhere from the World Economic Forum to the Munich Security Conference. There’s also Hamed Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and nine-year-old daughter when the Revolutionary Guards shot down a Ukraine International Airlines plane in January 2020, killing 176 passengers. His quest for justice propelled him to fame. 

That’s complemented by more marginal groups. Blending Islamism and Marxism, and led by Maryam Rajavi, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is perhaps the most disciplined example. Then there are those unaffiliated and apolitical Iranians who yet dream of a rejuvenated nation. That surely includes some who voted in the 2024 election who nonetheless hope that home-grown reform, supplanting an indefinitely delayed promise of regime change, can boost their country’s fortunes.

Taken together, then, the Iranian diaspora hardly knows what it wants. And if that makes concerted action difficult, the would-be revolutionaries are also split on strategy. Some, including the more nuanced academics and journalists rejecting opposition militancy, believe it’s only through splits in the regime’s top brass that change can finally come. Others back the idea of rebellion from below. Still others, notably Alinejad and anchors on the popular London-based Iran International TV, support sanctions and military action by the US and Israel. It’s surely no accident that, when officers began inquiries over the headscarf-snatching incident, Bahar Mahroo announced on X that she was leaving Britain — and flying to Tel Aviv. 

If the diaspora were adept at grassroots campaigning, these strategic disagreements might not matter. As it is, and as events in London so vividly show, many of them are remarkably skilled at securing bad press. Waving monarchist flags — emblazoned with a golden lion — they targeted polling stations across 90 different embassies. And though Pahlavi himself initially backed the action, much of the resulting conduct was anything but regal. Berating older voters with megaphones, activists told them to “plunge into their graves”. Elsewhere, women were scorned as prostitutes. 

Once you recall that some liberals also engaged in “delegitimisation” of the recent elections, you might imagine these people receive short shrift from the outside world.

But in fact, some corners of the Iranian diaspora have been feted over the years. After Mahsa Amini’s murder at the hands of Tehran’s morality police, for instance, Alinejad had a flashy European gig that involved one-on-one audiences with Emmanuel Macron and then-Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. Nazanin Boniadi, an actress and activist, shared a platform with the US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the UN, after a private meeting with Kamala Harris at the White House. That’s shadowed by appointments at neocon think tanks: over recent years, Reza Pahlavi has visited both the Hudson Institute and the Henry Jackson Society. 

More radical actors have also enjoyed their time in the sun. Despite its former designation as a terrorist organisation — and the fact that it’s sometimes dismissed as a cult — MEK is now being touted as a reliable alternative to the Islamic Republic. Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo have both visited MEK camps in Albania and France, as have the former premiers of Canada, Denmark and Italy. Even Liz Truss found the time. Delivering speeches about the so-called “saviours” of Iran, the dignitaries have reportedly managed to bring tears to the eyes of MEK’s lieutenants, albeit in return for staggering fees.

How can such sentimentalism be explained? One factor is surely the brutality of the Islamic Republic: with the internal opposition demoralised, it makes sense that the ayatollah’s enemies should be desperate for champions abroad. It helps, too, that some campaigners are more sophisticated than Bahar Mahroo. Soon after her death, Amini was movingly commemorated at events from New York to Istanbul. In Berlin, Esmaeilion assembled some 80,000 people, all chanting for Iran. Even MEK boasts a reasonably efficient propaganda machine. Given its bloody history of extrajudicial killings, the group can’t hope for much sympathy beyond its cadres of celibate fighters. But its online operations have sometimes proved impactful, thanks largely to a dynamic troll farm that plants stories by fake journalists.

Not that any of this can hide the diaspora’s ultimate failure. They may be received in the State Department and the Foreign Office. But almost five decades on from the Shah’s overthrow, the Islamic Republic endures. That’s even as Western officials remain far happier liaising with the theocracy in Tehran than with unreliable subversives abroad. As memories of the pre-1979 world fade, meanwhile, you get the sense that the expatriate conversation is becoming ever more parochial. For many so-called activists, politics starts and ends online, where they’re engaged in interminable arguments about which hypothetical leader is more righteous, or which of their rivals is actually a plant of the Revolutionary Guard. 

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All the while, the opposition’s figureheads enjoy what attention they can grab, visiting extravagant diplomatic banquets and speaking at K Street forums. But while they may once have been lauded for their courage and integrity, this rush to win awards and secure civil society funding feels increasingly hollow. Certainly, the rise of egos such as Masih Alinejad hasn’t struck a chord with ordinary Iranians. Though she certainly has charisma, Alinejad now claims to have marshalled the protests as a “leader” — and has even suggested she needs constant media attention to stay safe.

Despite enjoying the spectacle of a vocal partisan standing up to theocracy, Iranians instead wish the expat elite would put down their smartphones, leave their Brooklyn or Westwood Village bubbles, and help them overcome practical hardships. The exiles could, for instance, pressure foreign governments to provide Iranians with more accessible migration routes. They could encourage them to develop new satellite and digital communication options, allowing their compatriots to overcome internet censorship at home. They could also stress that certain sanctions might be eased intelligently, and that allowing basic international transactions can help freelancers and start-ups.

If nothing else, you got a sense of these frustrations back in June. In one London encounter, an activist lifted his camera to film a group of academics and writers strolling down the street to vote. Focusing on a straggler, trailing slowly behind, the cameraman informed him he was legitimising the Islamic Republic by voting in its “charade” of an election. But as the man was quick to point out, the election offered a choice, and voting against one didn’t mean he backed the system generally. “Damn the Islamic Republic!” he angrily rejoined, referring to hardline candidate Saeed Jalili. “The Taliban are coming, my dear!”

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

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I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

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There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

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If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.

I have met men who still long for their wives, when the separation has been longer than the marriage. I have met old Bolsheviks who kept rehearsing Trotsky’s actions after Stalin’s death, believing the Soviet Union would still be with us, and thriving if only he had returned two days earlier to Moscow. I have even met New Labour believers who think that if David Miliband had defeated his brother, then Brexit would never have happened and Labour would be in power, at the vanguard of a renewed EU.

When I listen to such claims, an old Yiddish phrase comes to mind, which is translated as: “If Grandma had wheels she’d be a trolly”. The conversation always ends in a kind of faraway silence. I find it hard to know what to say, while the person thinks about what to do next; whether to send a birthday card, write a letter to the Morning Star, renew their efforts to support Keir Starmer.

Sometimes the ship has sailed and it is never coming back to port. It has a new crew and a new cargo, a new trading route and a new flag. Yet they still believe that, someday, their ship will return; they stand at the dock, staring out to sea but always walk back home alone.

Sometimes things change, an era changes, and there is no going back. For institutions, for nations, as well as for people, this is hard to accept. For Britain and the United States, the Iranian Revolution is such a phenomenon. It was all going so well, and it is hard to accept that it will never go well again.

Muhammad Ali said that the first rule of boxing is that you never get knocked out by a punch you see coming. It is also the first rule of politics. And no-one predicted the form of the the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Both London and Washington did predict an imminent threat to the rule of the Shah, but from the Left, through a coalition between disaffected workers and intellectuals supported by the Soviet Union and led, within Iran, by the Tudeh Party. That is not what happened.

The spectre of Mohammad Mossadegh and the 1953 coup, orchestrated by the CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, held them in its thrall. Mossadegh was an aristocratic liberal nationalist who wanted to nationalise Iranian oil. At the time, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of BP, held a monopoly of oil production in Iran and signed a deal which only gave 19% to Iranians. It was effectively a nationalised industry and the profits were vital to post-war reconstruction. The NHS was founded on the assumption of continued revenue streams from Iran.

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The Labour Government of 1945 was extremely opposed to to Iranian nationalisation, while pursuing it vigorously at home. Colonial double standards. Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Clement Attlee all took a hostile view of Mossadegh and supported the Shah as the instrument of maintaining the status quo. Eisenhower agreed and Kermit and his muppet show was unleashed; Mossadegh was deposed and condemned to a life of internal exile.

That is the lost moment of Iranian history, the great “what if?” What if we had supported Mossadegh rather than depose him? What if Iran had grown into a liberal democracy?

This is the question that haunts the minds of our diplomats because what happened was completely different: an Iranian Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the imposition of an eternal form of clerical domination, “the rule of the jurists” — and there’s no way out.

The coming Iranian presidential elections on Friday indicate and express the doomed eternity of stasis that the revolution created. The inevitable winner will be Ebrahim Raisi, a mass-murdering apparatchik who was part of the four-man team responsible for the public executions of up to 30,000 Leftists in a few months in 1988 for the crimes of atheism and apostasy.

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He will be elected on a turnout of less than 30%. Most Iranians understand that the power lies not with the President, but in the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, which controls the Revolutionary Guard, the media channels, the clerics and foreign policy.

In other words, there is a double system. These elections are for a government that will pretend to govern while the real power lies elsewhere. Just look at the country’s vaccine programme, which has inoculated only 2% of the population. The Health Ministry fully participated in Covax to receive vaccines, and yet Khamenei announced a ban on both British and American jabs on the grounds that they were “likely designed to contaminate foreign nations”, leaving the Chinese vaccine and Sputnik as the only options. One is useless and the other is scarce.

The office of the Supreme Leader also vets who can stand for office, and they rejected all candidates from outside the revolutionary vanguard. The former reforming President, Mohammad Khatami, set up an “Association of Combatant Clerics” and put forward fourteen candidates, but each was rejected.

Iranian foreign policy is based on building proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the militias in Iraq, Hamas in Palestine, the Houthis in Yemen. And it’s the same at home. These elections are just proxy politics, the candidates represent the regime, not the people.

I sat through the first three-hour debate between the approved candidates. They were not allowed to discuss Covid, vaccines, sanctions, power cuts, sinking ships or burning factories. It reminded me of Brezhnev-era Soviet plenaries, where all the candidates agreed that the achievements of the Revolution were eternal, but the enemies of socialism were still sabotaging the project, particularly the Government.

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This time, it’s the unprecedented form of Shia theocracy invented by Khomeini that must be preserved. When I was in Najaf in 2018, the historic home of Shia religious authority, I met with two senior ayatollahs and many clerics, all of whom rejected the Iranian system as hostile to the teaching and practices of the Shia Muslim faith. In Iraq, a year later, I witnessed the assassinations of protestors by Iranian-backed militias. Tens of thousands of Shia protestors in Baghdad sang “Iran Iran, go away” every night. They are still there; still shooting them.

At that time in November 2019 demonstrations against the regime exploded all over Iran, so the Government turned off the internet and shot the protestors. Any remaining political prisoners were recently transferred to the violent offenders section of the prison. They won’t last long.

And yet Western diplomats still believe that it is possible to negotiate with the government, to normalise relationships, to go back to 1953 and do the right thing this time. The first foreign policy act of the Biden Presidency was to re-engage with Iran and revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, lifting sanctions on proxies and renewing the distinction between hardliners and “moderates”. This is not a distinction that is believed in by the Iranian people as reflected in the overwhelming majority who will boycott the election. The Biden approach still assumes that they are negotiating with Mossadegh when the truth is otherwise.

The Iranian Left have been utterly routed and the middle class lurk in North Tehran, playing cat and mouse with the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, over how much hair women can show in public. And yet the yearning of Iranians for something better and different cannot be stilled. It remains a crime in Iran to speak to others about Jesus or to claim that you have a relationship with him. And yet, the number of Christians there is now estimated to be close to a million.

There is a network of underground churches. Bibles are smuggled in and passed from hand to hand. The numbers continue to grow. It seems that for thousands of Iranians the only way to get rid of this regime is to change your religion. That is the long story in Iran. The desert church is lighting its candles for the prince of light once more.