The last shah of Iran was a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: outwardly haughty and magnificent, inwardly insecure and indecisive, a Persian Richard II, self-regarding even in his own downfall. When he stood at the foot of his aircraft steps as he left Iran for the last time in January 1979, tears streaming down his cheeks and killer cancer working away inside him, surely even the stoniest heart must have felt some pity for this fallen autocrat?
Not so. The stony heart of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini contained only rage and a desire for vengeance towards the King of Kings (the Iranian monarch’s official designation). “This man has no place in Iran, and no place on Earth,” Khomeini told me in a chilling television interview before leaving Paris for Tehran. On the plane bringing him back from a 15-year exile a few days later to overthrow the shah’s regime, Khomeini muttered that he felt nothing – hichi – on returning home.
