Hassan Rouhani took office as President of Iran in August in succession to a Holocaust denier, 9/11 conspiracy theorist and millenarian who gleefully anticipated the extinction of Israel and secured a second term of office through electoral fraud. Mr Rouhani could hardly have failed to be a more credible figure on the international stage.

Being an improvement on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is, however, an unexacting benchmark. In comparison with the hopes invested in him by Iranian reformers and Western governments, Mr Rouhani is underperforming. Iran is not a totalitarian state but it is a repressive one, with an extremist regime and a history of nuclear duplicity. Mr Rouhani was elected on promises of greater freedom for Iranian civil society. It would be premature to conclude that these have been betrayed but they emphatically have not been fulfilled.

Hugh Tomlinson, The Times’s correspondent in the Gulf who has been visiting Tehran, has reported this week on the quiet crackdown being implemented by the Iranian regime, and the disillusionment of reform campaigners. Repression after Mr Ahmadinejad’s stolen election in 2009 was widespread and draconian. Under Mr Rouhani it is more subtle and insidious. It is exemplified by a seven-year prison sentence imposed on Maryam Shafipour, a student activist, for “spreading propaganda against the system”. Mr Rouhani’s defenders maintain that he needs to work within the constraints of his office and secure his position against more reactionary figures within the country’s leadership. His reforming credentials cannot be judged purely on rhetoric, however: they have to be assessed against his record.

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