From left: HRH Princess Muna of Jordan, HM The King of the Belgians, HM The Queen of Denmark, HIM The Shah of Iran, HM The Queen of the Belgians, HM The King of Jordan, HM The Queen of Malaysia and HM The King of Lesotho, during the grand state banquet.

In 1953, a CIA outfit, working with MI5 and based at the US embassy in Tehran overthrew the only democratic government Iran has ever had. American and British removal of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh ushered in 20 years of repression at the hands of Mohammad Reza Palavi, in which millions of ordinary people were imprisoned or subjected to ‘scientific methods’ of torture at the hands of SAVAK agents, who themselves carried out research in such methods on behalf of the CIA. It was in the Shah’s prisons that the art of water boarding was first perfected.

Persians are more aware of their own turmultous history than most, but even the smallest understanding of1953 helps to explain why, in 1979, Iranian students, fearful of a counter-coup, instinctively occupied the American embassy after hearing that the deposed Shah had arrived in New York.

A few years earlier, the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire (Persia had been rebranded Iran in the 1920s by a British-installed Shah) was celebrated amongst the ruins of the ancient city of Persepolis. A city of
prefabricated apartments was constructed, each designed to look like a tent by the same firm that outfitted had the White House for Jackie Kennedy. A helicopter pad lay at the centre of the tent city, with streets of tent-apartments radiating from it. In three days, one tonne of caviar was consumed, whilst two hundred chefs were flown in each day from Paris to feed the assembled dignitaries. The photos of the event are remarkable and available after a quick search on Google- Princess Margaret sits alongside US Vice President Spiro Agnew, whilst close by, the Shah himself, in sparkling white military regalia and with sabre sits surrounded by suited presidents, robed princes and uniformed heads of state from across the globe. Emperor Hailé Selassié’s dog was presented with a diamond necklace.

These extraordinary images are crucial to really understanding how fundamentally different Iran was just 30 years ago, and the complexity of our relationship with it. 30 years ago, Iran was not the dusty, alien wasteland of religious
fundamentalism, AK-47s and the hijab which we’re tempted to imagine today. They were ‘one of us’. Wealthy Persians would fly to Paris or London for lunch and an afternoon’s shopping. The Shah was secular, and only slightly more exotic than any other European monarch. He had dinner with Nixon in the White House and rode on Air Force One. They liked us, we liked them, we both hated the Communists, and who cared if SAVAK threw political dissidents into sacks of ravenous cats and hooked communist party members’ testicles up to car batteries?

The remarkable thing is, despite all this sordid history, you’d be hard-pressed to find a young Iranian who doesn’t admire American or British popular culture. On my travels in Syria, a fellow traveller who had just arrived from Iran told me how he had sat on a coach whilst an older woman, dressed in head-to-toe in chador, laughed her head off at a DVD playing at the front of the bus. It was a Mr Bean sketch from the early 90s of Roan Atkinson losing his trousers in a public swimming pool.

There are over 700,000 Iranian blogs out there, with reviews posted of the latest movies, the censors bypassed by downloading them. There’s Persian-language fan-fiction from young Iranian Harry Potter fans, and plenty of middle-class kids who, arriving home throw off their obligatory chador and listen to System of a Down up loud,  Sex Pistols posters on their bedroom walls.

The next Iranian revolution –this time a democratic one- is only a matter of time, and the boneheaded rhetoric of our leaders over the past 10 years has only served to delay it. The current regime has created the conditions for its own
undoing. In the years since 1979, government incentives have led to one of the highest birth-rates and one of the youngest populations in the Middle East. The same period saw a massive expansion in university education, and in more recent years, soaring unemployment and the proliferation of the internet have created a generation that is educated, frustrated and connected to the outside world.

Reading the blogs, it’s easy to see a generation which views with contempt a regime of sanctimonious old men which they consider to be corrupt, hypocritical, incompetent and increasingly irrelevant. It is often said by travellers that whilst it is difficult to persuade a Syrian or Egyptian to talk about internal politics for reasons of repression, it’s equally hard to get an Iranian to speak of anything else. Ambivalence towards the regime is, by most accounts, everywhere, and increasingly out in the open.

So what should Britain do? In June, Iranian presidential elections will be held, and there is a good chance that Mohammad Khatami will be permitted (that’s how it works, unfortunately) by the Supreme Council to stand for President. He held power from 1997 to 2002, and introduced a programme of reform which significantly relaxed conditions within the country; his tenure constrained only by the intransigence of conservative clerics and certainly not helped by the inflammatory rhetoric coming out of Washington. With Obama now in the White House, there is a chance that for the first time in a long time, there will be sane people in charge of both countries, put there not by foreign pressure but by the better judgement of their citizens. Now is the time to show some humility, to be mindful of history, to avoid encouraging hardliners with inflammatory rhetoric and sermons on democracy, and, over the next few months to lie low, cross our fingers and keep our mouths shut.