Alistair Campbell

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.

Big, big focus on Shia martyrdom, on the regime.

And the regime had delivered, they felt, for these villages.

These people who'd felt marginalized under the Shah, who felt under the Shah it had all been about money and oil and

glamour in the cities.

Electrification had come, roads had come, there'd been a big push on rural development.

And so, I guess if you were trying to explain why these revolutions didn't work, say, in 99, or even three years ago with Massa Amini, you probably would have said, look, this is still a society where people are divided.

where either you have a rebellion of the working class or you have a rebellion of more progressive women about headscarves, but the two things don't come together.

And you also would have said that Iranians are very proud nationalists, so that it was noticeable when Israel and the US bombed Iran and the Shah's son and Netanyahu called for everybody to rise up, they didn't rise up.

So you would have said, actually, Iranians, when push comes to shove, are quite nationalistic.

What's changing here, Chris DeBlake, who has written really well about this in Unheard, he was saying to me that he thinks it's young people.

It's a completely new generation, which in a very sort of way that would sort of shock older Iranians.

don't really have a beef with Trump, can't remember what the Shah was like, perfectly happy to endorse Pahlavi without necessarily the Crown Prince not knowing so much about him, and much more violent, much more prepared to, it seems as though police officers have been killed, places have been stormed.

And some of that driven by social media.

That's another strange thing about Iran.

I mean, despite the fact it's autocratic, everybody's got VPNs, everybody's watching videos from Elon Musk.