Alistair Campbell

which is much less ideologically motivated traditionally than the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij, beginning to defect and split.

Any other thoughts on how you can tell whether regimes have had a fall or not?

I was looking at the mini revolution, do you remember, against Gorbachev?

So 1991, where suddenly the tanks rolled out and there was a coup d'etat and the head of the KGB and everybody toppled him.

And then Yeltsin appeared on tanks and, you know, women marched along the bridge in Moscow.

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.