Last Wednesday morning I was invited to go on telly to talk about women and the election. I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about the dearth of visible female politicians in this campaign. I’m sick of the leaders’ wives being seen and not heard, of the fuss about their pedicures and their fashion choices.
Rather than giving us endless first-lady escort puffery — my husband, my hero — why aren’t the parties wooing the female vote (a key swing demographic this week) by wheeling out women qualified to talk policy?
With that going through my mind, I said yes. The show’s host was an old professional acquaintance of mine, Lauren Booth: half-sister of Cherie Blair, pundit and alumna of I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!. No alarm bells there. The channel, I was told, was “Sky 515, Press TV”. A car would be sent to pick me up; it was to be a half-hour live show at 6.30pm. I got on with my day.
The taxi arrived and we chugged to a studio in west London. I was a little confused as it wasn’t Sky HQ. “Have you been to Press TV before?” asked the receptionist. I hadn’t. I sat on a leather sofa and waited, looking through my notes. A young Middle Eastern woman collected me and took me down in a lift. There was Lauren Booth. I didn’t recognise her for a minute because she was wearing an aquamarine hijab and frosted pink lipstick. What was going on?
“Thanks so much for coming on,” she said cheerfully. My face must have registered some shock. “Don’t worry: only presenters have to wear a headscarf,” she grinned, and she walked off down the corridor. I noticed that everyone around me looked Middle Eastern and the walls were bedecked with pictures of Iran. D’oh! The penny dropped. Press TV: the controversial television channel backed by the Iranian regime.
I noticed that everyone around me looked Middle Eastern and the walls were bedecked with pictures of Iran D’oh! My heart started to race and I grabbed my phone. Thank God for mobile internet. Seconds later I’d found Press TV on Wikipedia; it was not reassuring. The station was set up three years ago to give the Islamic republic a way of getting its message across to the outside world. It is designed to look neutral to attract western journalists and politicians.
But its message is always the same: it chooses those who are critical of the West for propaganda reasons. As well as Booth — who has been outspoken in her attacks on Tony Blair and Israel — its presenters include that old apologist for tyranny George “Saddam Hussein’s mate” Galloway and Yvonne Ridley, the Express journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban and converted to Islam.
The more I read, the more uncomfortable I felt. Visions of the violent death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman shot dead by Iranian government security forces as she took part in the protests last year over the rigged election, swam into my mind. I remembered the seas of green flags, the awe-inspiring bravery of all those thousands of ordinary Iranians who ventured onto the streets declaring the election void, protesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, had swindled his way to victory, despite the risk of murderous reprisals.
Most of all I recalled the terrible accounts of the brutality with which the regime punished protesters; how so many of them had disappeared, their frantic families knowing nothing of their fate, and had been taken to secret prisons where they had been raped and tortured.
Last June, when the demonstrations started, it fell to me to edit an account of the torture of the protesters by the Iranian security services that was so horrific it was almost unpublishable. The version that eventually appeared was gut-wrenching, but the full details were unimaginable. In fact they haunt me. I have wondered many times how any human being could endure or mete out such treatment. They left me with an abiding disgust for the Iranian regime.
Yet here I was, sitting in the green room of the ayatollahs’ propaganda TV station, expected to go live on air any minute, to millions of people all over the world, criticising the British election for not having enough female voices on the stump. My brain was racing. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Within the context of Britain, our democratic and deeply tolerant country, I do feel we’ve got a way to go.
It pains me that we rank only 61st in the world when it comes to representation of women in parliament; it is bad that only 20% of the MPs elected to the new parliament this week will be women. But those criticisms are petty compared with the problems in Iran, where elections are not free and fair, free speech is restricted and women are not allowed to uncover their heads or sing in public (let alone become president). The idea that my views on the British election could be used as propaganda against the West by being aired in such a context revolted me.
My body flooded with adrenaline; my brain was filled with one thought: get out of here now I looked at my watch. Any minute the producer would be back, but going on the programme, I realised, was impossible. My body flooded with adrenaline; my brain was filled with one thought: get out of here now. “I need to make a call; I can’t get a signal,” I told the young man who asked where I was going. Heart beating, I went through two security doors and past the guards into a low-level car park. I have never been so pleased to see the Hanger Lane gyratory.
I let out a sigh of relief and called Booth to explain why she was going to be a woman down for her discussion programme. A few minutes later my phone rang: it was Press TV. “Where are you?” it asked. “I’m on my way home,” I said. “Sorry to let you down at the last minute but I have a problem with the Iranian regime. I can’t appear on your channel.” The total lack of surprise with which my announcement was greeted suggested I was not the first to bolt.
I was interested to see how Booth justified her new job: “I will have to agree to disagree with you when you refer to Press TV as the ‘propaganda arm of the Iranian regime’ ... we make cutting-edge programmes on the Middle East and UK politics with no interference whatever (in my experience) from Tehran.” Oh, Lauren. Censorship comes in many forms, including omission. Would we really have been allowed a full and frank discussion of Neda and torture?
As I was writing this column I checked the Press TV website; the propaganda was in full swing. “Iran”, it boasted, “has won a four-year term on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, an influential body explicitly dedicated to promoting gender equality.” The report continues: “Iran has reconsidered its application for candidacy on the Human Rights Council.” I rest my case.
