By Bagehot
IT IS becoming clear that British diplomats had a very close shave in Iran when student members of a regime-controlled volunteer militia, the baseej, stormed two British Embassy compounds in Tehran on November 29th. The recently-appointed British ambassador to Iran, Dominick Chilcott, has given a remarkable interview to the BBC about what he and his staff went through on Tuesday, made somehow all the more chilling by Mr Chilcott’s sober, matter-of-fact delivery. The world had already seen pictures of demonstrators crossing over the high, spike-topped brick wall of the main embassy compound in central Tehran, and images of vandalism inside the site (which is a bit like the campus of a British public school in feel, with a mixture of grand buildings and surprisingly homely cottages scattered around a walled park).
