It is no surprise that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put the “evil British Government” at the top of his list of Western powers that he accuses of fomenting the biggest street demonstrations in Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Britain has been a convenient scapegoat and whipping boy for Iranian leaders when things go wrong at home. According to an old Persian proverb, if you trip over a pebble, you can be sure it was put there by an Englishman.

In the tumultuous prelude to the revolution, the late Ayatollah Khomeini was convinced that the BBC was supporting the US-backed Shah. The monarch, in turn, had little doubt the BBC was helping London to destabilise his regime by broadcasting everything Khomeini said from exile in France.

Three decades on and many Iranians still see Britain as “perfidious Albion”, a scheming “little Satan” that pulls the strings of the “Great Satan” America, which is viewed as a superpower with more brawn but fewer brains than its “duplicitous” Anglo-Saxon ally.

Such flattering perceptions of Britain's power are little consolation to its diplomats in Tehran whose historic embassy — a green oasis in the heart of the dusty, teeming capital — has been the frequent target of anti-British demonstrations over the years, some of them violent. A street flanking the embassy was re-named Bobby Sands in the 1980s, after the IRA hunger striker, although a new road sign spells it as “Babi Sandz”.

Most Iranian taxi drivers still use its original name, Churchill Street, which honoured Britain’s wartime leader who celebrated his 69th birthday at the embassy in November 1943, with Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt.

Britons, bemused by the deeply held Iranian suspicion of their country, usually have no idea of its historical roots. Iranians are steeped in the history of British imperial meddling in Iran in the 19th and 20th centuries. The defining moment was in 1953 when British intelligence joined with its American counterpart in a coup that overthrew Iran’s popular, elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, and returning power to the unpopular Shah.

To those few Britons who know of the coup, the episode might seem like ancient history – but it remains very current to most Iranians who still view Britain as a great power with global reach.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a powerful hardline cleric and Ahmadinejad supporter once opined at Friday prayers that “The British are the worst conmen, the most devious people and they are foxier than everyone else.” Claiming that British diplomats are spies, an Iranian newspaper quipped that to join the Foreign and Commonwealth Office you had to be an “incorrigible bugger”.

Nevertheless, in a canny move to keep viewers from tuning in to opposition satellite channels beamed in from the US, Iran’s state-run television has been broadcasting live action from England’s Premier League. It is a huge hit.

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