There are moments in public life when a government finally agrees to call a thing by its proper name. Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to bring the proscription of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before Parliament is one such moment – dilatory, hedged, overdue, but nonetheless significant. For once, Westminster seems prepared to admit that the IRGC is not a “complex actor” in some regional psychodrama, but the armed vanguard of a totalitarian project that has long since overflowed Iran’s borders and seeped into our own streets and institutions.

To grasp the importance of this, one must first abandon the polite fiction in which the IRGC is described as a mere branch of Iran’s armed forces. It is nothing of the kind. It is a state within a state: part praetorian guard, part expeditionary legion, part secret police, part mafia conglomerate. It strangles Iranian civil society at home and arms fanatics abroad, from Lebanon to Yemen, with a cheerfully ecumenical hatred of Jews, dissidents and democracies alike. To speak of it in the same breath as a normal army corps is like calling the Gestapo a law‑enforcement agency.

For years, Britain has indulged in precisely that sort of euphemism. Faced with mounting evidence of IRGC‑linked plots, intimidation and propaganda in the UK, ministers chose to wring their hands about “consequences” and “delicate diplomacy”. The result was a policy that managed to combine cowardice with self‑deception: we........

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