The arrest of eight people on the staff of the British Embassy in Tehran is a clear portent of what is to come. The eight are themselves Iranian, but that is of no great significance. They are innocent victims of a series of mistakes on the part of the mullahs, one mistake leading with grim logic to the next. The process of repression is gathering. Informed sources say that as many as 4,000 have been arrested, not just activists but journalists and bloggers. To involve embassy staff, however, with its echo of the 1978 hostage-taking that destroyed the pitiful Carter presidency, is to contrive to conceal a domestic issue by externalizing it.

The mullahs’ initial mistake was to fix the election so blatantly that nobody could possibly credit its outcome. The percentage of the vote allocated to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was absurdly high, evidently in order to boost his image as really popular in every section of the community. Similarly the percentage allocated to the other candidates was absurdly low, evidently with the purpose of showing that they were unsupported even by their own clansmen and people in their home areas and towns.

The outburst of anger that followed was a spontaneous mass protest. How could this anger be explained away? The mullahs are never going to blame themselves. Instead they resort to the hallowed conspiracy theory that outsiders have been interfering. To believe that there are outsiders with the power to mobilise the masses requires the suspension of reason. But still, this is a country in which the slogan “Khomeini, tool of the British” was once painted on the walls – the idea being that Khomeini was so damaging the country that only the British could have had the malevolence to put him into power.

The next step now is to fabricate a case against Britain. Not long ago, the Iranians took hostage fifteen British sailors in the Gulf, and paraded them on television in a humiliating piece of theatre. The mullahs can calculate that the British government will be as supine about its diplomatic staff as it was about its sailors. A dim and ineffectual Foreign Secretary says that he is “deeply concerned,” thus airing what must be the most pointless cliché in the entire vocabulary of politics. If the arrest of these staff members does not lead to anything much that the mullahs can exploit, then the Foreign Office can expect that British diplomats and even visitors will become hostages, in a reprise of that tactic. One lie engenders another. “O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” The mullahs are proving the truth of Walter Scott’s famous lines.

The length of time that passes before some British or even American official says that none of this bears on willingness to enter negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program will be the measure of Western defeatism and masochism. And the mullahs will then conclude that they have only to extend the chain of mistakes and lying.