Dominic Sandbrook

And this is symptomatic of a sort of wider tradition.

glitz and glamour and corruption of the Shah's court.

So by the early 70s, he's got multiple palaces.

He's got a country house in England.

He's got a country house in Switzerland.

He has a palace just for his mistresses who are either escorts flown in from Paris or Lufthansa air stewardesses.

His half-sister is taking millions of dollars in kickbacks.

The bloke who books his escorts is given the caviar export monopoly.

And actually, it's sometimes suggested that a lot of this is kind of Islamic revolution propaganda.

That basically the Ayatollahs massively exaggerated how corrupt the Shah's court was.

But after the Shah's fall, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, David Owen, commissioned an internal report.

And this report, British Foreign Office report, basically said it was really corrupt and the Shah himself was taking massive bribes on defence contracts.

Oh, totally it is.

And the oil is obviously a massive part of this story.

So the Shah liked having money and in the 70s he gets a lot more of it because in autumn 1973, after the OPEC oil shock in which he was a key player, the price of oil almost quadrupled.

And Iran was the world's second biggest oil exporter.

So this means the Shah has this colossal windfall and now he really can make Iran great again and he can fulfill his dream.

So his big sponsors by this point, by the 70s, are not the British, they are the Americans.

All through the post-war years, the Americans have backed the Shah as a key ally against

Soviet expansion into the Persian Gulf, which is one of their big fears.