The Iranian media weren’t impressed by the first nuptial kiss or the tooling around London in an Aston-Martin, which were just ignored. The media were more interested in portraying the wedding as the latest example of perfidious Albion and British evil.
One element of criticism is the cost of the wedding. The state news channel reported, “Many Britons are angry that this wedding is being held at a time of economic stagnation in Britain. They ask how can a couple spend tax money on their own wedding when Britons are losing their jobs, suffering from economic stagnation and pushing wheelbarrows.”
The costs of the wedding itself were born by the two families, but the security costs, estimated at $20 million, were born by the government. And the security costs soared when the government made the wedding day a national holiday so that the police had to be paid twice the normal pay scale. The cost issue has been much discussed within Britain.
The daily Siyasat-e Ruz said the wedding proved that the British monarchy actually rules and does not just reign. On the cost issue, the daily said, “Like other double standard policies of the West, it [the costs] will be concealed through propaganda and the blame game against other countries.”
Siyasat-e Ruz continued: “While the British newspapers write about Qadhdhafi’s dictatorship and his monarchial rule, they themselves execute such a dictatorship through modern methods. The survival of Qadhdhafi’s reign is continuing through bullets and in Britain it is happening through propaganda, but no fundamental differences can be seen between the two.”
The logic of the editorial was so tortured that some readers speculated the editorial writer was not serious. Under both the monarchy and the revolutionary regime, newspapers often run nonsense editorials packed with strained logic and ideological cant just to please officials—while simultaneously looking down their noses at those same officials.
PressTV, the regime’s English language broadcast outlet, had a similar strained editorial. “The UK, if it was a democracy, has lost its credibility to be a democratic state,” PressTV intoned. “There have never taken place so many democratic activists’ arrests anywhere in the world, not only on suspicion of thought crime, speech crime or political assembly crime, but now on offenses defined by the British police as pre-crime.”
Iran’s senior diplomat in London, like all the other chiefs of diplomatic missions in London, was invited to Westminster Abbey for the wedding. It isn’t known if he actually attended.
The British media generally editorialized against the invitations to Iran, North Korea and Zimbabwe, among others. The day before the wedding, officials announced that one invitation had been revoked—the one issued to the Syrian envoy.