the profile of a "people's representative" rather than that of a distant father-figure. "It was like a US president heading off to town hall meetings in New Hampshire every week," one of his supporters told me.

When Mir Hossein Moussavi stood against Ahmadinejad in the 2009 election – which the former believed he would have won had the votes been counted fairly – he would appear on the streets of Tehran with educated, T-shirted young men and women with their hair showing beneath their scarves on one pavement, while bearded men and women in chadors would curse him from the other. Another of the president's supporters said: "I voted for Ahmadinejad because he stood up for the underclass – unlike Moussavi's comrade Mohamed Khatemi [who was president for eightyears before Ahmadinejad] who always seemed to be drinking English tea with Jack Straw."

But then Rahim-Mashaee appeared in the president's office as head of Iran's heritage organisation, becoming ever closer to Ahmadinejad. Rahim-Mashaee had been in the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guards, during the 1980-88 war with Iraq and had then become a radio manager for Iran's state broadcasting company; rumour has it that he also worked in the intelligence ministry. "But by the end of Ahmadinejad's first term, Rahim-Mashaee was in the president's office all the time," an Ahmadinejad detractor said.

"He was saying things that the conservatives, the principalists, didn't like – he said that Iran's conflict was with Israel, not with the Israeli people. But the conservatives said that these 'people' were occupying the land of Palestine.