Britain should have boycotted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inauguration

For two months tens of thousands of courageous protesters have taken to the streets of Iran, defying the savagery of the security forces and risking limbs, lives and liberty to resist a coup d’état by a hardline regime that had almost certainly been voted out of office.

How utterly dispirited they must have felt, then, how demoralised, to see the ambassadors of Britain and other Western nations attending President Ahmadinejad’s swearing-in ceremony yesterday. The converse is also true. How inspiring it would have been if they had had the guts to stay away, or to send their most junior diplomats, like Germany did.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that it had dispatched the ambassador because the international community had to keep talking to the Iranian regime about its nuclear programme, so “communication channels have to be kept open”. It had indicated its displeasure at the events of the past two months by witholding the customary letter of congratulation. It calls this “hard-headed diplomacy”.

Somewhere between London and Tehran, this rather nuanced message apparently got lost in translation. Mr Ahmadinejad did not welcome the Western envoys to yesterday’s ceremony: he mocked Britain, the US and other countries that had withheld congratulations for thinking that he cared about their approval.

It is impossible to talk to the demonstrators as foreign journalists have been ejected from Iran, but it is hard to imagine them rejoicing at the lack of missives from the West. It is far more likely that they saw the ambassadors’ presence as de facto recognition of a thoroughly vile regime.

Obviously the West must try to engage with Iran to dissuade it from developing nuclear weapons, but yesterday’s craven performance was hardly the way to do it. It smacked of weakness, even desperation. Since the election Tehran has done nothing but heap indignities on Britain. It has accused the “Little Satan” of masterminding the unrest, expelled the BBC’s Tehran correspondent, and arrested the embassy’s Iranian employees — effectively robbing it of its eyes and ears.

Mr Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are many things, most of them not very nice — but they are not fools. They may or may not negotiate on nuclear issues, but their decision will certainly not depend on whether a clutch of ambassadors graced the President’s inauguration.

At a time when the opposition needs all the support it can get, all that Britain and its allies proved yesterday is that a regime can steal an election with impunity, and then brutally crush the opposition.

Martin Fletcher