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Tehran, Wednesday 24 January 1979

Three army tanks block the entrance to Mehrabad International Airport, following an announcement by the Shi’ite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that he intends to return to Iran on 26 January after fourteen years of exile. ‘Khomeini is not coming, not at all,’ a major tells reporters.

It is eight days since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled abroad, with mass demonstrations and strikes convulsing the country he has ruled for three decades. The tanks in the roadblock – British-made Chieftains – are themselves symptoms of the malaise which laid him low: both Muslims and Marxists were enraged by his dependence on Britain and the United States, his use of military force to crush dissent and his apparent contempt for Persian traditions.

Shahpour Bakhtiar, the prime minister, said after the Shah’s departure that Khomeini was welcome to return home, but has adamantly refused to accept the Ayatollah’s demand that he should yield power to an Islamic theocracy. As the tanks arrive at the airport, Khomeini’s principal envoy in Tehran, Mehdi Bazargan, holds a news conference at which he describes his old friend Bakhtiar as a ‘reasonable, logical and patriotic man’ who must now accept the inevitable and give way to the Ayatollah. To mollify liberals, socialists and other secular opponents of the Shah, who have become increasingly fearful of Khomeini’s ambitions, he adds that the proposed new government will be called an ‘Islamic Democratic Republic’ rather than merely an ‘Islamic Republic’.

What will it mean in practice? In an interview with the newspaper Ettelaiat the Ayatollah denounces dancing and cinema as unIslamic, and limits his promises of free speech to exclude ‘things not in the national interest’. At the Tehran news conference, Bazargan rejects models such as Libya and Saudi Arabia, explaining that he favours a government like that ‘we had for ten years under the Prophet Mohammed and for five years under the Imam Ali’. In short, the intention is to restore a regime that last existed almost 1,300 years ago.

Monday 29 January

In Tehran, troops open fire on demonstrators who have burned two cinemas, two restaurants, a liquor shop, several bordellos and a nightclub. The protesters are seen ‘chortling with delight’ as they throw champagne bottles from the club’s cellar on to a bonfire.

At the American embassy, Iranian soldiers guarding the grounds have to be replaced after one shoves an assault rifle into an American officer’s belly and yells, ‘Yankee go home!’ As the original sixty-man contingent drive away in trucks, they all shout the same refrain.

Outside Tehran University, where at least thirty-five people were killed by army bullets yesterday, Major-General Taghi Latifi is dragged from his Mercedes 220 and badly beaten. A leaflet distributed on the campus says the time has come to establish a ‘people’s army’ and attack the United States and Israel. ‘We have to get guns,’ it adds. Thousands of students take up the chant: ‘Machine guns, machine guns, the answer to everything.’ On sale inside the university are photographs of the Shah holding a glass of wine and Empress Farah wearing a one-piece swimming suit. Even girls whose blue jeans are visible beneath their ankle-length Muslim robes brandish the photos as proof of the royal couple’s dissolute habits.

Alarmed by the crescendo of violence, Shahpour Bakhtiar announces that the country’s airports will reopen tomorrow. Americans, Europeans and Iranian Jews make plans to leave as soon as possible. At his villa in the Parisian suburb of Neauphle-le-Château, Khomeini issues a statement confirming that he will return within the next forty-eight hours. ‘If there is any blood to be shed, I want to be among my people.’

Thursday 1 February

Accompanied by a retinue of journalists and Iranian students, Khomeini boards a chartered Air France Boeing at Charles de Gaulle airport. Throughout the five-hour flight to Tehran, the black-robed, white-bearded seventy-eight-year-old reclines on a carpet in the first-class compartment. As they enter Iranian airspace, a French reporter asks: ‘What are your emotions after so many years of exile?’ The Ayatollah, who has ignored previous questions, murmurs ‘Hichi’ – the Farsi for ‘nothing’.

Khomeini steps off the plane at 9.30 a.m. to a thunderous reception from at least a million supporters, many of whom have waited all night for a glimpse of their hero. In a brief statement at the airport, he says that ‘final victory’ will come only when ‘all the foreigners are out of the country and uprooted … I beg to God to cut off the hand of all evil foreigners and all their helpers in Iran.’ He is then whisked into a limousine for a triumphal motorcade through the centre of Tehran to the cemetery of Behesht-e-Zahra, where he pays tribute to the hundreds who died in the months of demonstrations against the Shah. From there, he is flown by helicopter to his new revolutionary headquarters, a former girls’ school near the Iranian parliament.

According to the BBC correspondent John Simpson, who travelled from Paris with Khomeini, ‘a millennial frenzy took over the entire country. People wept and shouted and beat their chests in an ecstasy of hope and joy.’ Newspapers publish ecstatic poems which reflect this chiliastic optimism:

The day the Imam returns

No one will tell lies any more

No one will lock the doors of his house;

People will become brothers

Sharing the bread of their joys together

In justice and sincerity.

London, Wednesday 10 January

James Callaghan, the British prime minister, looks tanned and relaxed on his return to England after six days at an international summit in Guadeloupe, where he was photographed swimming with young air-stewardesses during a break from discussing the Soviet nuclear threat. Britain, by contrast, is freezing and paralysed: thousands of lorry-drivers are on strike, most ports and many factories have shut down, all roads into the city of Hull are blockaded by secondary pickets, hundreds of schools have closed for lack of heating oil, supermarkets are running out of food and railway workers have announced that they will begin a national strike next week. And all because of Callaghan’s insistence that no pay rise in the private or public sector shall exceed 5 per cent, at a time when inflation is above 8 per cent.

Arriving at Heathrow airport, Callaghan is asked by a reporter about ‘the mounting chaos in the country at the moment’. The avuncular smile that earned him the nickname Sunny Jim disappears at once. ‘Please don’t run your country down,’ he admonishes. ‘If you look at it from the outside, you can see you are taking a rather parochial view. I do not feel there is mounting chaos. I don’t think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.’

A few hours later the political editor of the Sun, Walter Terry, files his report of the press conference: ‘Sun-tanned premier Jim Callaghan breezed back into Britain yesterday and asked: Crisis? What crisis?… Not even the threat of up to two million people being laid off work next week worried jaunty Jim.’ The Sun’s editor, Larry Lamb, adds the coup de grâce by repeating Terry’s pejorative précis in a huge front-page headline: ‘CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?’

Wednesday 28 March

A day of high parliamentary drama. For the past couple of years Callaghan’s minority Labour government has limped from one crisis to another, kept alive by wily parliamentary manoeuvring and makeshift alliances – first with the Liberals (during the ‘Lib-Lab pact’ of 1977–8) and then with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists, who were cajoled into acquiescence by the promise of a Devolution Bill. On 1 March, however, referendums in Scotland and Wales failed to deliver the support necessary for the home-rule proposals to become law, whereupon the nationalists abandoned Callaghan.

The Ulster Unionists have also backed the government in recent months, but only in return for legislation increasing the number of parliamentary seats in Northern Ireland. When the Bill received the royal assent last week, they too decided there was no longer any advantage to be gained from propping up a wheezing and enfeebled administration. Seizing her opportunity, the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher has tabled a motion of no-confidence in Her Majesty’s government. If passed, it will precipitate a general election.

The debate is preceded by feverish and often farcical horse-trading. Having won round three Welsh Nationalists by promising a new scheme to compensate coal-miners suffering from lung disease, Callaghan still needs to find two more votes before tonight’s division. The Labour minister Roy Hattersley gives Frank Maguire, the Independent member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, three bottles of whiskey plus the promise of an inquiry into food prices in Northern Ireland. Some Ulster Unionists try unsuccessfully to trade their votes for a pledge to build an expensive natural-gas pipeline under the Irish Sea.

Opening the debate, Margaret Thatcher says that ‘the government has failed the nation … Britain is now a nation on the sidelines. Rarely in the post-war period can our standing in the world have been lower or our defences weaker.’ Labour has ‘centralised too much power in the state’, paying ‘far too little attention to wealth creation and too much to its redistribution’.

The prime minister, who celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday yesterday, attacks the Conservatives and their ‘lap dogs’ in Fleet Street. He also sneers at the Liberals and Scottish Nationalists for allying themselves with the Tories: ‘The minority parties have walked into a trap … It is the first time in recorded history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas.’ He concludes with a surprise announcement that old-age pensions will be increased in November: ‘Let need, not greed, be our motto.’

Ill and dying members are brought from their beds, some by ambulance, to be wheeled through the lobbies at 10 p.m. But the seventy-six-year-old Labour MP Sir Alfred Broughton, who suffered a heart attack a week ago, is too weak to leave hospital. If the vote is a tie, the Speaker would be obliged by precedent to exercise a casting vote on behalf of the government. Because of Sir Alfred’s absence, however, the no-confidence motion is passed by 311 votes to 310.

Callaghan, the first British prime minister to have his government brought down by a censure motion since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, announces that he will seek a dissolution of parliament and a general election as soon as essential business is cleared. ‘Now that parliament has declared itself, we shall take our case to the country.’

Friday 4 May

The Conservatives have won an overall majority of forty-three seats in yesterday’s general election – the biggest margin of victory by any party since 1966. Labour’s share of the poll, at 36.9 per cent, is its lowest since 1931. While Audrey Callaghan moves the family’s belongings out of the back door of 10 Downing Street, her husband leaves by the front door to ride to Buckingham Palace and hand in his resignation to the Queen. He then departs for his Sussex farm, pausing briefly en route to offer commiserations to staff at the Labour Party HQ in Smith Square.

Shortly afterwards Margaret Thatcher is summoned to the palace, where she formally accepts her appointment as prime minister by kissing the monarch’s hands. She is then driven in a black Rover to Downing Street. Looking rather subdued and slight among the swirl of reporters and burly police officers, she quotes a favourite phrase of her former colleague Airey Neave, who was killed by a car-bomb at the beginning of the election campaign: ‘There is now work to be done.’ Before disappearing through the door of No. 10 to get on with it, she also recites ‘some words of St Francis of Assisi, which I think really are just particularly apt at the moment’:

Where there is discord may we bring harmony,

Where there is error may we bring truth,

Where there is doubt may we bring faith,

And where there is despair may we bring hope.