Tom Tugendhat

I am grateful to the Minister, whom I call a friend, for his response today. However, after almost a decade of consistent Foreign Office advice to reject photographs with Iranian officials, and particularly handshake photographs, because of the propaganda tool that it gives the regime, it seems that our Foreign Secretary has just been ambushed in New York. Either he was ambushed by a snapper, or there has been a change of policy. It is important that we understand which, because although it is certainly clear that the Foreign Secretary did not look happy, Araghchi was absolutely beaming. If that was not deliberate, has the Foreign Office changed its advice, and if so, why? Frankly, following the Iranians’ threats against UK airbases that both the Minister and the Prime Minister have mentioned, the state threats that the head of MI5 has listed, which have been reported today, the murder of 40,000 of their own people, their expansion of violence in Yemen by using the Houthis to target civilians in Riyadh, and their attacks on Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, I would be very grateful to know what made the Foreign Secretary believe that it was worth giving them a propaganda win. Perhaps the Minister will tell me that this does not matter, but he knows better than that. He knows that images project a message, and in this case they project the message that the Iranian regime is equal to the moment. Well, it is not. The reality is that the Iranian regime—and, in fact, Mr Araghchi himself—is merely a front for the IRGC, which is of course the terror group responsible for the murder of thousands in Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Iraq and elsewhere. I will finish by asking the Minister a few questions. Was the Foreign Secretary aware of his Iranian friend’s threats to the United Kingdom before he decided to shake hands with him and have it photographed? Was he aware that the US and Israel had given warning to the British Government that the Iranian regime’s threats to US airbases in the UK were credible? Lastly, has the policy of the UK now reverted to not giving propaganda wins to such a vile regime?