spell, Ahmadinejad himself.

The potential fall of Ahmadinejad is a story worthy of any Persian tale, a pageant of court favouritism, abrupt firings of otherwise loyal ministers, apparent challenges to the Islamic heritage of Iran, and an acute case of political hubris by the president himself, all overshadowed by the immense power of Ayatollah Khamenei who holds the near-divine role created by the Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Some compare Ahmadinejad's predicament to that of Ayatollah Sayed Hussein Ali Montazeri, the man Khomeini chose as his successor as Supreme Leader – and then abruptly dismissed when Montazeri's son-in-law was seen to have too much power over him. In Ahmadinejad's case, the danger is Rahim-Mashaee, a civil engineer from the Caspian region of Iran, whose daughter is married to Ahmadinejad's sonand who packed the president's office with his own supporters from the same region of Iran. At one point Ahmadinejad wanted to make him first vice-president – a post equivalent to any other nation's prime minister – only to be thwarted by his opponents.

According to those who have followed the saga from Ahmadinejad's original election to the presidency in 2005 – he only won in the second round and was never expected to hold office – the conservative clergy and revolutionary founders, the "principalists" as they call themselves, believed that Ahmadinejad never had the stature for the role as Iran's political leader.

But the new president maintained his popular support by touring hundreds of villages, small towns and cities, from Isfahan and Mashad to Tabriz, in order to create