Iranians vote for change, however gradual For a moment it looked as if she was going to tear her headscarf off. The large, colourfully dressed woman in the crowds thronging Tehran's Kaj Square did not speak much English, but she had no problems making herself understood. "We're so happy, we're so happy," she shouted, amid the cacophony of honking horns and joyous celebrations that greeted Saturday evening's unexpected announcement that Hassan Rouhani had won Iran's presidential election in the first round of voting, without requiring a runoff. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country, thrilled at the possibility of change. For me, the only British journalist allowed into Iran to cover the election, it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the evening. But then, in the shadows at the north end of Kaj Square, a nondescript shopping centre in one of Tehran's middle-class districts, I noticed about 20 policemen watching the surge of people. Perhaps it was fortunate that the woman kept her head covered. Even before Rouhani's victory was confirmed, many voters had been uncharacteristically hopeful. "Peace, peace, and not in enmity with anyone - that's what I want," a young woman told me in the long queue of voters outside the Hoseiniyeh Ershad mosque in Nnorth Tehran on Friday. And it seems that this optimism has been rewarded. In Rouhani, Iran has secured a president who will, at the very least, be less verbally aggressive and abusive than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the outgoing leader. He will also seek to change Iran's relations with the world. Rouhani's senior aide, Mohammad Akrami, told me that the new president wanted to "improve women's rights and ease the dress code." He has also pledged to end the current stalemate over Iran's nuclear programme. Yet many here say that, whatever the election result, the real power will remain entrenched in Iran's vast and complex security system. The sunglassed Basij militiamen on their motorbikes will still enforce the clerics' will, alongside the powerful Revolutionary Guard. Change, if it comes as a result of last Friday's vote, will be gradual indeed. "I don't believe a word of it," said a well-dressed woman in north Tehran when asked about her vote. I didn't vote. They are all conservatives, they are all the same," she added. Rouhani appears to be something of a post-Islamic revolution phenomenon. He has three political roots. One is planted close to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A second stems from his own track record as head of Iran's national security council and one-time nuclear negotiator. The third is newly germinated in elements of the reform movement that was so violently put down after the last presidential vote four years ago. No sooner had votes been counted on Saturday than those close to the supreme leader started to deny that Rouhani had ever been anywhere near a reformist thought. So why did more than 18 million Iranians vote for him? "The economy," a taxi driver said. "Sanctions," said a woman in a black hijab and chador (the full-length cloak worn by Iranian women). We can't carry on with inflation like this, I won't be able to live. It is clear that Iran's theocratic leaders were badly bruised by both the Green movement uprising after the 2009 presidential election - when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest against the official results, which they believed had been rigged - and the violence required to contain it. On Saturday the supreme leader even talked about it: "The people suffered from the lawlessness of 2009. Then there was passion and excitement, but along with insults. We have progressed a lot in four years," he said. But not far enough for the wife of the leading reformist Mostafa Tajzadeh, who protested, wearing green, outside a polling station in north Tehran. My husband was a minister under [reformist] President Khatami. He's been in prison for four years," she said. He refused to defend himself; he regarded his trial as unfair. No one knows how many political prisoners there are but researchers talk of many hundreds. Mentioning them is not popular with the authorities here. Indeed, many within the security apparatus do not like foreign journalists being here at all. They resent the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance for giving visas to me and my team. Last Tuesday, while working on a story about the effect of western sanctions on healthcare, we were arrested outside a pharmacy in which the price of bowel cancer drugs had risen tenfold in six months. The eight young plainclothed zealots from the Revolutionary Guard refused to identify themselves but they made it clear who they were. Eventually we were released, but only after gaining a sharp insight into the colliding interests of the factions that make up Iran's Islamic revolution. And yet beyond the bugs in hotel rooms, the arrests, and strange people taking photographs wherever you go, there is something continuously absorbing and intriguing about Iran that renders the paranoia it provokes entirely bearable. The country is spectacular, the people are approachable, friendly and remain westward-looking. Many are highly educated and skilled, and 6,000 years after the country began, they are still building. In short, they are people the west used to and should still do business with. For all its faults, Iran remains a haven of peace, surrounded by wars in which the west is deeply involved, and set to become more so after Barack Obama announced his intention last week to arm the Syrian rebels. By midnight on Saturday the Chamran highway that leads to the centre of Tehran was sporting a noisy three-car-wide, five-mile queue of families desperate to join the celebrations. Perhaps Rouhani has just earned Iran a break. On the ground there seems to be a very slim chance that things will change, but the regional timing is far worse than challenging. Perhaps Obama would consider extending the open hand of friendship he mentioned in his Cairo speech four years ago to Rouhani.