One of the more curious features of Westminster life is its talent for recognizing a blazing house only once someone else has sprinted up and down the street ringing every bell in sight. For years, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was precisely such a conflagration: a sprawling, openly theocratic terror‑bureaucracy masquerading as a branch of a foreign state, and yet, in the strange etiquette of Whitehall, somehow considered just beyond the reach of the fire brigade.

The IRGC is not, as some earnest apologists would have it, a slightly over‑zealous regiment with a flag and a hymn. It is the iron fist of the Iranian regime: part Gestapo, part mafia, part foreign legion. It crushes dissent at home, bankrolls and arms proxy militias abroad, orchestrates plots on European soil, launders money and ideology with equal gusto, and makes a particular sport of menacing Jews and dissidents wherever they happen to live. To treat it as a normal arm of state is as daft as treating the Kray twins as a neighborhood watch scheme.

Into this polite derangement stepped the We Believe Alliance, which made a simple but impolite observation: if one is serious about national security, about antisemitism, about foreign dictators reaching into British streets and campuses, then leaving the IRGC off the proscribed list is not prudence – it is dereliction. And rather than merely muttering this over canapés, they set about forcing the question.

The first decisive move was a House of Lords briefing that did what our politics so often avoids: it joined the dots. Peers, MPs and advisers were taken, calmly but relentlessly, through the evidence – the IRGC’s command structure, its role in arming Hamas........

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