When Iranian Revolutionary Guards seized fifteen Royal Navy sailors and marines who were inspecting a merchant ship in the Gulf straits in March, the British reaction was one of shock and disbelief. Surely there was some misunderstanding? It soon became clear that the prisoners had in fact been taken hostage. Against all the rules of war, they were coerced into making humiliating appearances on Iranian television; a particularly ugly touch was that the only female sailor was denied her uniform and obliged to wear a Muslim hijab. They were forced to serve the purposes of Iranian propaganda by reading prepared confessions and statements calling for the British to pull out of Iraq. The hostages were threatened with a trial, while staged demonstrations outside the British embassy called for their execution. Americans who had been through the hostage crisis of 1979–1981 could and did tell the British what to expect. One former hostage told the BBC about one of his captors, a certain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and warned against appeasing “that bastard,” thereby storing up trouble for the future, as Jimmy Carter had notoriously done.
Tony Blair made no secret of his anger and swore there would be no concessions, but opinion polls showed that the British public had no stomach for confrontation, which chimed with the reflexive pusillanimity of the Foreign Office. At first the British concentrated on exposing the mendacity of Tehran’s claim that the Royal Navy had been operating inside Iranian waters. That this claim was a