By Mehdi Sepahvand
Conservatives in Iran have already started voicing grave suspicion of UK Ambassador to Tehran Nicholas Hopton just a few days since his appointment.
Iran and the UK restored diplomatic relations to the highest level by exchanging ambassadors on September 5 after a near five-year moratorium.
But on September 11, the state-run Mehr news agency published an article in whose headline it called Hopton a fake diplomat.
The article calls the newly appointed envoy an intelligence force who has previously worked for a foreign security organization in the UK before he started work as a diplomat in the Foreign Office, where his work also included the area of security.
The article goes on to note Hopton’s presence in Yemen during the Arab Spring and his role in conveying “secret messages between London and Doha” in relation to support for “terrorist groups” during the rise of the Syrian crisis.
The article underlines Hopton’s “specialties in soft war and campaign”, raising the point that the envoy has come with a special mission months before presidential elections in Iran.
This much for conservative media, but the Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi said on September 10, “No matter Tehran and London have upgraded their relations to the ambassador’s level, Tehran should keep a vigilant eye on Britain’s newly appointed envoy, given the perception here in Iran that the UK cannot be trusted anyway.”
“We should be very careful England doesn’t exceed its limits through its ambassador and acts only within the political framework outlined by the Vienna Convention and other international regulations,” said
The UK closed its diplomatic compounds in Tehran in November 2011 after being stormed by a crowd of protesters, itself a consequence of London imposing new sanctions on Iran at that time.
“While the government (of Iran) has decided to upgrade relations, the British diplomat must always be watched as the country has had a negative record both before and after the Revolution,” the senior parliamentarian underscored.
“The English should avoid repeating their past mischiefs, and their performance needs to be watched continuously,” said Boroujerdi.
While there is compelling evidence that the conservative remarks serve genuine worries, as right-wing politicians in Iran have always dismissed the UK as an enemy with soft ways and intricacies, there can be another concern for those who have started the campaign against the new UK envoy.
The UK has left a record of supporting change in Iran, not the least obvious being what it did during the 2009 presidential disputes.
By acting quickly to portray a negative image of Hopton, the right-wing party may be planning to undo whatever efforts their rivals may be intending to make to raise in Iranian voters the hope of some change during their presidential campaigns, thereby channeling the votes to their own side.
The presidential elections in Iran will be held in the first half of 2017. President Hassan Rouhani may like then to run for a second term. But he will face the numerous instants of criticism that the more conservative rivals have directed at him. They have nearly refused to accept as helpful all of his efforts so far, the biggest of which being the nuclear deal.
Another newly-sprung issue for which conservatives are lashing out at Rouhani is his cooperation with the Financial Action Task Force which is required to boost Iran’s financial transparency and chances of international business. But the right-wing side has accused Rouhani of paving the way for enemies to infiltrate the country. There is enough sense in believing that the same logic is going on in the case of Hopton.
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