...That is the lesson for Iran: it probed and found weakness. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, can undertake equal or greater provocations, confident he need not fear a strong response. Iran held all the high cards and played them at a time and in a manner of its choosing. At the end, British diplomacy was irrelevant. Mr Ahmadi-Nejad was the puppet-master throughout, taunting and admonishing Mr Blair not to prosecute the hostages for illegally entering Iranian waters, as they had confessed. That is chutzpah! Amazingly to US ears, some in Britain criticised Mr Blair for being too tough.

Emboldened as Iran now is, and ironically for engagement advocates, it is even less likely there will be a negotiated solution to the nuclear weapons issue, not that there was ever much chance of one. Iran, sensing weakness, has every incentive to ratchet up its nuclear weapons programme, increase its support to Hamas, Hizbollah and others and perpetrate even more serious terrorism in Iraq. The world will be a more dangerous place as a result. Evidence may already be at hand in the deaths of four British soldiers in Basra on Friday.

Quite possibly, the Iranians were divided internally and may well have stumbled into success at the end. This has already inspired the media's commentariat to conclude that the Foreign Office's "softly softly" approach worked. The Captain Ahabs of British and US diplomacy, obsessed by their search for Iranian "moderates", those great white whales, are proclaiming yet another "moderate" victory in this outcome. Surely, the "moderates" prevailed; how else to explain the hostages' release?

Indisputably the winners in Iran were the hardliners. It was Mr Ahmadi-Nejad who stood in the international spotlight for hours on end, who awarded medals to the Revolutionary Guards who captured the hostages, who announced the hostages' release and accepted their thanks. Even if the moderates concurred in the outcome, divergent motives can lead to the same conclusion. The question is, who increased relative to others in the Iranian calculus of power? The evidence unmistakably points to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. If strengthening his hand within the Tehran leadership amounts to success for British diplomacy and Iranian moderates, one hesitates to ask what would constitute failure...