Javid Shah?

The Department for Business and Trade still publishes advice on how to trade with Iran and do business there. Should the regime fall, then what might realistically replace it? Not ideally. Realistically. The longstanding neoconservative and liberal-interventionist aim was to install the weirdest political cult in the world, which had been based in exile since 1981, leaving it no constituency in a country of which half the population was under 30 years of age. The Americans relocated that People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (Mojahedin-e-Khalq) to Albania between 2013 and 2016, not without local resistance, although it also maintains a considerable presence in the France of Emmanuel Macron, as well as an office in Cricklewood.

Consider how the world turns, since that outfit was headquartered for many years in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where it participated in atrocities committed by the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard. During the Iraq War, Biden’s, Bush’s and Blair’s Boys bombed the PMOI/MEK into surrender, as part of a deal with Iran to hand over certain al-Qaeda suspects who were of course in any case opponents of the Iranian regime. Oh, how the world does turn. Opponents of the Iraq War were screamed down as Islamists and revolutionary Marxists due to the presence of a few of each in our enormous ranks. But these people really did and do manage the remarkable feat of being both, yet they were nevertheless closely allied to Saddam Hussein.

Now, though, affections seem to have been transferred to the extremely pro-Israeli, and overtly Israeli-backed, partisans of Reza Pahlavi, hitherto a ridiculous fantasist supported by almost no one else in the world apart from a mostly elderly three per cent of Iranian-Americans, heavily concentrated in and around Los Angeles, and prominent in the off-the-books state and institutional violence against the pro-peace encampment at UCLA. But the cause of Henry Tudor was ridiculous once. We now know that the Whig magnates were in constant contact with the Jacobite court in exile, just in case. Bourbon and Bonaparte Restorations were romantic fantasies until they happened. People scoffed at the Eastern European governments in exile in London until they were installed in their own capitals. Why, the overthrown Tsar of Bulgaria even came back as Prime Minister. And here we are.

Throughout this century, the Israeli flag has been conspicuous at Far Right events the world over, and those in support of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon have also featured most or all of the Iranian monarchist flags in Britain outside specialist museums of one or more of Persiana, royalty and vexillology. Israel now wants the Pahlavis, so the Americans will presumably jump to it, and Donald Trump would be glad to do so, recognising kindred spirits. Half the American electorate would now vote for Trump if he were dead, and will vote for his dynastic successors at every opportunity. At last, the United States has a conservative movement and party in the purest Old World sense, straightforwardly loyal to rule by a particular House. Yet it is not, as had once seemed likely, the Bourbonesque Bushes, but America’s Bonapartes. Or Pahlavis. Like Napoleon, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi even crowned himself. Your move, Donald.

The Anglo-Saxon populist and Far Rights have finally found a monarchy that they liked. They hate the King as a second generation Green and as an Islamic fellow-traveller, if not in fact a Muslim, while their occasional allies, Loyalist rather than Royalist as befitted the heirs of the Roundheads and of the Covenanters, consider the King pretty much deposed for having prayed with the Pope. The populists, at least, want Alberta, which would almost certainly be joined by Saskatchewan, to secede from Canada either as a satellite republic of the United States, or as integral part of it. For that matter, if Bougainville did indeed secede from the King’s Realm of Papua New Guinea to pursue alignment with the King’s Realm of the Solomon Islands, then would it nevertheless do so as the republic that it had tried to become in 1975?

But I digress. The hardest British republicanism that I have ever encountered has always been among the Blairites. Such are the centrists who, agreeing with the populist Right in principle as they usually do, are also cheering on the protestors in Iran, even calling, as is their wont, for military intervention. They think that monarchy is backward, as any American or Israeli politician or commentator does axiomatically. And like those, they think that Iranians want and need a monarchy, albeit one that turned 100 only last month and which reigned for all of 54 years in the vast sweep of Persian history. Remember, though, that we who have doubts are the racists.