British Embassy (Tehran)

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hague]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for what he said about our staff and how they have conducted themselves. He is right to draw attention to the difficulties and downsides of any way of proceeding in this situation. As a former Foreign Secretary, he will know that we must be able to be confident that we can look after our staff, and that assurances of host Governments can be believed. Sometimes our staff continue to operate in very difficult and dangerous circumstances. At the moment, Yemen is an example of that, but even there, where there have been two attempts on the life of our staff in the past 18 months, we do not suspect that parts of the regime there are implicated in attacks on our embassy. That makes life dramatically more difficult, and must be weighed heavily in any balance of the question.

We must also consider that the incident in Iran has happened in currently difficult diplomatic circumstances, but we cannot be confident that those circumstances will not deteriorate further over the next 12 months or so, so we must have regard to what might happen to our embassy in those circumstances. Having considered all those matters, the Prime Minister and I believe it is right to take this action, not to sever all relations, to put the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) right, because it is still possible to have diplomatic contact under what I have set out, but to close both embassies.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I join the Foreign Secretary in paying tribute to the locally engaged staff and our diplomatic staff, whom I last met at the embassy when I visited in 2008. They have had to endure three incursions into the embassy in the past four years, and this is the most serious and obviously threatening to British interests and property.

The E3 plus 3 works best when it works as one in negotiating with Iran, and withdrawal of our embassy leaves much of the day-to-day contact with the Iranian Government in the hands of the Chinese and Russian E3 plus 3 members. What confidence does the Foreign Secretary have that those two member states will play their full part in ensuring that negotiations with Iran come to a successful conclusion?

[Mr Hague]

It is not solely the Russian and Chinese embassies that will be there, because the French and German embassies are still in Tehran, although both France and Germany are taking very strong diplomatic action in the light of these events. I will not make their announcements for them, but they are outraged by the events and will follow with their own strong diplomatic action. Those countries are still in Tehran, and are an important part of the E3 plus 3 process. Although we have differences with Russia and China, the process is by no means wholly in the hands of those countries.