Hardline cleric who vowed to buy Man United wants to keep Iran at war

 An Iranian cleric who once vowed to buy Manchester United is now trying to blow up Iran’s peace talks.

Almost two decades ago, Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi announced that his organisation was purchasing the club and would rename it “Kheybar” after a seventh-century battle in which Muslims overran a Jewish settlement.

The claim never advanced beyond the headlines, but it captured the man perfectly: grandiose, provocative and impossible to ignore.

Now, Mr Kharrazi is back with another goal.

As Tehran edges towards an understanding with Washington over reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Mr Kharrazi, the self-styled secretary-general of a fringe group called “Hezbollah of Iran”, has launched a barrage of claims aimed at the officials negotiating an end to the war.

Mr Kharrazi claimed that Masoud Pezeshkian, the president, had tried to resign more than two dozen times, and that Mojtaba Khamenei – Iran’s new supreme leader – had warned that one more resignation would be accepted.

He also claimed Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, had been told that he was no longer permitted to intervene in the negotiations.

The president’s office called the resignation claims “vain and utterly false”.

The supreme leader’s office described the account attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei as “fundamentally false”, warning that spreading such material sowed “division in society” and “serves the goals of the sworn enemies of the Iranian nation”.

On Saturday, the judiciary said Mr Kharrazi had been summoned to the special clerical court and placed under criminal investigation, warning he could face “multiple security charges” and an arrest warrant if he failed to appear.

The Iranian news outlet Jomhouri Eslami read the timing as no accident, arguing that whenever the prospect of calm and an exit from war grows, certain factions attempt to sabotage a deal over the Strait of Hormuz.

That resistance to ending the war came from elsewhere on the same day.

Gen Hossein Mohebbi, the spokesman for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, said the strait would reopen only when Washington fully accepted Iran’s conditions.

“Whenever America accepts Iran’s terms, the Strait of Hormuz will certainly open,” he said.

Gen Mohebbi claimed that the strait’s fate had nothing to do with current negotiations between Iran and Oman and described the waterway as a “component of the geographic and strategic power” of the Islamic Republic – a harder line than the foreign ministry, which has cast the Oman talks as the route to safe passage.

Iran’s negotiators, working through Oman, have said a framework for shipping through Hormuz is nearly complete, awaiting sign-off from the country’s top bodies.

The chasm between Gen Mohebbi’s claims and those of the government points to the same fault line Mr Kharrazi is exploiting.

It is a revealing glimpse of the hardline resistance that Iran’s negotiators face from within, even as they try to end the war.

Mr Kharrazi belongs to a recognisable Iranian archetype.

He is a well-connected insider with no official post, but a close enough proximity to power that his words cannot be dismissed.

Family ties, clerical robes and even the banner of an obscure organisation let such figures reveal supposed secrets, accuse or threaten officials, and provoke denials from the highest levels, all while remaining safely on the margins and returning later with a fresh claim.

Sousan Kharrazi, his sister, is married to Masoud Khamenei, the younger brother of Mojtaba Khamenei.

Sadegh Kharrazi, the cleric’s brother, was a veteran figure in the foreign ministry and Iran’s ambassador to France. Kamal Kharrazi, his uncle, served as foreign minister and headed the strategic council on foreign relations, a body established by Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an Israeli air strike earlier this year.

Mr Kharrazi has claimed to have maintained a 40-year friendship with Mojtaba Khamenei and attended private meetings with him.

He studied jurisprudence and philosophy in the seminary before, by his own account, continuing his education in Canada.

Islamic Republic ‘no longer works’

In a five-minute video released last month, Mr Kharrazi was shown addressing a religious gathering, but what he delivered was less a sermon than an organisational blueprint.

He claimed to have built a “shadow government” long before Saeed Jalili, the hardline politician, popularised the term.

“Before Mr Saeed Jalili ever said, ‘I’m forming a shadow government,’ we had already formed one, and we still have it,” he said.

He added: “We have 60 thick volumes of plans covering the finest details of every organ and institution.”

He framed the project as a plan to dismantle the Islamic Republic itself and replace it with clerical rule.

“We have prepared a programme to implement the system of guardianship – even for how to turn the Islamic Republic into an Islamic government,” Mr Kharrazi told the crowd. “We have the organisation and the planning.”

The Islamic Republic, he declared, had “reached a stage where it simply no longer works in this form”.

His rhetoric has also focused on the enforcement of the mandatory hijab.

He has previously said that if 50,000 Hezbollah members were deployed on the streets of Tehran to confront women with no headscarves and kill those who resisted, the “problem would be solved”.

If the government tried to stand in their way, he warned, it would be “next” and would not dare intervene.

“This is Islam,” he said. “We must strike and be struck.”