For the beleaguered group of diplomats holed up in the British Embassy compound in Tehran and surrounded by a baying mob of Iranian protesters, it was, as one of their colleagues phlegmatically remarked yesterday, “a very hairy few hours”.
The embassy staff had been forewarned that trouble was brewing. All Tuesday morning, pro-government Farsi websites had posted comments calling for protesters to gather in Bobby Sands Street. This is the name that the road leading to the British Embassy was given by the ayatollahs when they last squared up to Britain, over the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989.
