“I t’s an exercise that is necessary and frankly has been missing for the past 47 years,” said Mehrdad Marty Youssefiani, a founding member of a new group seeking to act as an umbrella for Iran’s disparate exiled opposition. The Iran Freedom Congress – which includes republicans and monarchists, Marxists, right and centre – met for the first time last month in London, aiming to create an ethnically diverse “platform for coordination, dialogue, and cooperation between Iranian pro-democracy and pluralist individuals, parties, institutions, and organisations”. Since the conference, the body has been given a legal entity, and elections for a chief executive are under way. It does not claim to be a government in waiting, or a new political party. “We cannot claim from exile to return after 47 years and run a country which is by and large foreign to those that have not been there for 50 years,” said Youssefiani, who until 2018 was an adviser to Reza Pahlavi, the son of the former shah.…