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Last week, Iran committed an act of war against the United Kingdom. How else are we to describe the seizure of our embassy staff? Indeed, such outrages don’t usually occur even in wars. If, say, Venezuela and Colombia were to initiate hostilities tomorrow, we could reasonably assume that diplomatic personnel would be safely evacuated through neutral countries. It happened even during the Second World War, when mutually hostile ideologies sought to extirpate each other.

How did Her Majesty’s Government respond to this unprovoked attack? It called in the Iranian Ambassador for a jolly severe ticking off. There was a time when Britain would have sent gunboats to the Gulf. Oh, hang on: we already have gunboats in the Gulf. The Iranians attacked one of them last year – the deployment of coercive force against uniformed British Servicemen on HMS Cornwall was an even clearer act of war – and, once again, we let them get away with it.

That’s the thing about nasty regimes: concessions embolden them. Do you remember the very first act of the Islamic Revolution thirty years ago? It was the seizure of another embassy, that of the US. The mullahs were deliberate in their choice of target: by signalling their disregard for territorial jurisdiction, they were announcing that they answered to a higher authority than international law.

They... >>>