Alistair Campbell

And it turned out that in the end, the soldiers were not prepared to fire.

And this is what I saw in Indonesia.

I was in Indonesia in 98 when Suharto, the dictator general, fell after 32 years.

And I remember being with the crowd moving forward towards the soldiers.

And

But you were getting a sense of a swell, bigger and bigger and bigger.

The police had abandoned the streets.

And again, I remember this is May 98, people saying Suharto will fight to the last bullet.

He'll retire into the hills like a Banana Republic dictator with his own.

And actually, he didn't.

He just quit.

He just announced that he was stepping down.

I remember feeling, so I walked across Iran, I guess, in 2000.

And my strong sense then, so that's about sort of halfway between the revolution and now, is that you had this massive class split.

So you had many people saying to me, oh, if you go to Isfahan or Tehran, it's very liberal and everybody's drinking alcohol and nobody's wearing headscarves and these amazing parties and everybody's very decadent.

But in the rural villages where I was staying, people were very, very conservative.

It was a sort of village working class environment.

They were all the kind of people who would eventually vote for Ahmadinejad.

I was being stopped by the Basij militia all the time.

There were huge images of the martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.