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 country, I’m not sure how crucial a flag-flying British embassy is to Israeli black ops.

To be fair to the Foreign Office – for that is the organ of state that is set most firmly against the ban, while many wiser heads at the Home Office support it – there are other more substantial reasons. One senior diplomat recently summarised them to me in a message. Blacklisting the IRGC, he said, ‘would increase the threat to the UK; harm other work by the UK, Europe, the US and its allies to counter the threat to Iran; and not give the government no meaningful new powers to counter the IRGC (which is already sanctioned in the UK).’

The first of these claims – that the threat to Britain would be increased – can be filed under cowardice, pending any meaningful detail.

The second point, that banning the group would place Britain out-of-step with our European partners, warrants consideration. In the dovecote that is the European community, our influence on Iran policy has traditionally been relatively hawkish, particularly in the nuclear negotiations that failed so spectacularly last year. But this argument is predicated on a worldview that places better diplomacy above the demands of national security on our own soil. What’s the point of greater influence in Brussels if dissident Iranian journalists are being stabbed in west London?

The Foreign Office frets that proscribing the IRGC would be an unprecedented move because it is a state entity. What worms would emerge from that newly opened can, it asks? Would there be a bad-faith campaign to proscribe the Israel Defence Forces? Surely it would turn the rules of diplomacy upside down? Once again: file this under hand-wringing cowardice. The Americans blacklisted the IRGC in 2019 and that didn’t bring the sky down. On the contrary, it meant that dissident Iranian journalists whose lives were at risk in Britain have been able to flee to a place of safety. The United States, which made the move that we are resisting, gave them refuge. That tells you something.

Mandarins also argue that in bilateral talks with the Israelis, including during the Prime Minister’s visit to the country in October, banning the IRGC was not on the list of requests made by Jerusalem. This argument feels a little rum to me. Perhaps the Israelis were a little more focused on Gaza? Banning the group was a demand made by the Americans after October 7, which we ignored. And Benjamin Netanyahu himself publicly called for the measure in a recent interview with an Iranian dissident channel based in Britain.

Which brings me to the most significant Foreign Office claim: that a ban would ‘not give the government no meaningful new powers to counter the IRGC (which is already sanctioned in the UK)’. This, I’m afraid, is just wrong. Ultimately, it amounts to a belief that to counter the Iranian threat on our shores, we simply need to keep doing what we have been doing, but more so. More sanctions. Tougher enforcement of existing laws. That kind of thing. Very well. But let us consider how well the current policy is working, and how a ban would help.

The scale of the Iranian threat on British soil is serious. I have been told by security sources that Iran is often at the very top of their list of concerns. That is why figures like former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove have been calling for the IRGC to be blacklisted.

In 2022, the director general of MI5 revealed that the IRGC had attempted ten assassinations in Britain that year. In his annual speech on the threats facing Britain, Ken McCallum said Iran’s ‘aggressive intelligence services’ was actively planning terrorist attacks on British soil, labelling it as ‘the state actor which most frequently crosses into terrorism’. Tehran was a ‘sophisticated adversary’, he added. Last year, Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing at the Met, disclosed that 15 Iranian plots to either kidnap or kill people in the UK had been foiled.

The stabbing of journalist Pouria Zeraati this month, believed to be at the hands of the IRGC, was a case in point (it goes without saying that he has called for the group to be banned). But this is far from the first time Iranian agents have threatened violence, or indeed carried it out.

Last year, Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, confirmed that Iranian agents were mapping prominent Jews in Britain for possible targeting in the event of a war with Israel. In 1992, dissident television presenter Fereydoun Farrokhzad was knifed to death in Bonn. In 2021, an Iranian diplomat was convicted of plotting to bomb an opposition rally in Paris. And in 2019, an Iranian ex-pat in Glasgow told the Times that he had been threatened by regime goons with a handgun.

These attacks are just the sharp tip of a spear that is being allowed to hide in plain sight. Because the IRGC is not proscribed, organisations can have open links with it and not fall foul of the criminal justice system. One group with alleged links to the IRGC is the Islamic Centre of England (ICE). Based in a former cinema in London’s Maida Vale, just a short walk from several synagogues, it has been described by Alicia Kearns, chair of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee, as the IRGC’s ‘London office’. It was given an official warning by the charity commission – for it is a charity – after it held a vigil to honour the memory of Iranian terror mastermind Qasem Soleimani . This would be illegal were the IRGC proscribed. (An ICE spokesman has previously said the centre is a ‘purely religious and cultural organisation, which provides various services to the local communities… It is an independent charity regulated by British law, which is totally funded by the local beneficiaries. The majority of the trustees, donors, and attendees are British citizens. Indeed, this charity is nothing to do with politics, while we strongly believe that the politically motivated lobbies are trying to drag the charity into their political disputes.)

This is not the only such centre in Britain that may be closed down in the event of proscription. In another revelation by the Jewish Chronicle, we exposed the Islamic Student Association of Britain, based in a former Methodist church in Hammersmith now known as ‘Kanoon Towhid’, round the corner from the Godolphin and Latymer girls’ school. According to our report, since 2020, the organisation has hosted online talks with multiple senior IRGC commanders, several of whom are sanctioned by Britain for human rights abuses.

One such speaker, Saeed Ghasmi, we reported, whose job is to hunt down enemies of the regime, told the students that had Soleimani not been killed, ‘we could have taken over one after another the European countries you are studying in.’ The JC reported that Ghasmi insisted that the Holocaust was a hoax. ‘The real Holocaust,’ he insisted, ‘happened in my country in the first world war, 1917-19, when the UK occupied Iran.’ (The former chair of the association said ‘Islamic Students Associations have never had any direct or indirect affiliation to the IRGC or any army, government or security group anywhere in the world and neither have I… Islamic Students Associations have never held any physical gathering/deminar/conference in Kanoon Towhid or anywhere else with any of the falsely accused individuals.’)

The conclusion is clear. The fanatics of Tehran are not good chaps at heart that just need to be placated. They are not like you and me, and certainly nothing like Winchester-educated Mr Sunak, or Eton’s Lord Cameron. They are gripped by a deeply malevolent ideology that lusts after an apocalyptic war. They have a threefold strategy to achieve this: overseas militia, ballistic missiles and nukes. They are serious. To think that British sanctions will contain the threat is like trying to stop a rampaging knifeman with a fine.

When it comes to foreign policy, the Wykehamist fallacy has much to answer for.