Lord Renwick, the Labour peer and former Foreign Office mandarin, used to say that young diplomats of a certain breeding suffered from the ‘Wykehamist fallacy’. This, he said, was the tendency to assume that even the most bloodthirsty despot had an inner civilised chap of the sort one might find at Winchester College. Treat him decently and the inner fair-minded fellow would come out. ‘Actually’, Renwick would point out, ‘they’re a bunch of thugs.’

Given Rishi Sunak’s own schooling, the Wykehamist fallacy came to mind when the prime minister’s spokesman made clear that the government would not be banning Iran’s terrorist arm, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Surely if the Iranians could just be persuaded to pull on some pads and play a round of cricket, we could sort this frightful mess out?

According to the PM, Britain will not blacklist the IRGC for fear that the regime would retaliate by breaking off diplomatic relations. Without diplomatic channels, Sunak’s spokesman said, we would be deprived of ‘one of our most effective channels for avoiding escalation.’ I get that. But you might be forgiven for thinking: so what? This is a regime bent on war, murder and the subjugation of the West. Surely it’s no time for more fruitless jaw-jaw?

Personally, I tend to think that our cringing desire to ‘avoid escalation’ lies at the heart of the problem, as it has bled so easily into appeasement. Iran is a far smaller military power than the West. Its defence budget amounts to under $10 billion, compared to the United States’ $850 billion, our $31.5 billion and Israel’s $23 billion. The Ayatollahs know this very well. But they also know that we prefer to invite them for talks, talks and more talks. And when the missiles fly, we play defence.

Lord Cameron has echoed the Prime Minister’s message, adding another point: if we banned the IRGC, the Iranians would shut down our embassy in Tehran. This, he said, enabled Britain to ‘deliver a direct message to the Iranians’. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that in the world of international diplomacy, communicating with the Iranian regime is a lot more complicated than sending them an email. It still doesn’t weigh against the imperative to keep our people safe.

Mandarins have also argued that our embassy in Iran is useful for the purposes of espionage, not just for our own purposes but also for the Americans and Israelis. I remain sceptical. Given the spectacular Mossad operations of recent years, from the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the ‘father of the bomb’, to a string of mysterious explosions at nuclear plants around the........

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