...The station was set up three years ago to give the Islamic republic a way of getting its message across to the outside world. It is designed to look neutral to attract western journalists and politicians. But its message is always the same: it chooses those who are critical of the West for propaganda reasons. As well as [Lauren] Booth -- who has been outspoken in her attacks on Tony Blair and Israel -- its presenters include that old apologist for tyranny George "Saddam Hussein's mate" Galloway and Yvonne Ridley, the Express journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban and converted to Islam.

The more I read, the more uncomfortable I felt. Visions of the violent death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman shot dead by Iranian government security forces as she took part in the protests last year over the rigged election, swam into my mind. I remembered the seas of green flags, the awe-inspiring bravery of all those thousands of ordinary Iranians who ventured onto the streets declaring the election void, protesting that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, had swindled his way to victory, despite the risk of murderous reprisals. Most of all I recalled the terrible accounts of the brutality with which the regime punished protesters; how so many of them had disappeared, their frantic families knowing nothing of their fate, and had been taken to secret prisons where they had been raped and tortured.

Last June, when the demonstrations started, it fell to me to edit an account of the torture of the protesters by the Iranian security services that was so horrific it was almost unpublishable. The version that eventually appeared was gut-wrenching, but the full details were unimaginable. In fact they haunt me. I have wondered many times how any human being could endure or mete out such treatment. They left me with an abiding disgust for the Iranian regime.

Yet here I was, sitting in the green room of the ayatollahs' propaganda TV station, expected to go live on air any minute, to millions of people all over the world, criticising the British election for not having enough female voices on the stump. My brain was racing. I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Within the context of Britain, our democratic and deeply tolerant country, I do feel we've got a way to go. It pains me that we rank only 61st in the world when it comes to representation of women in parliament; it is bad that only 20% of the MPs elected to the new parliament this week will be women. But those criticisms are petty compared with the problems in Iran, where elections are not free and fair, free speech is restricted and women are not allowed to uncover their heads or sing in public (let alone become president). The idea that my views on the British election could be used as propaganda against the West by being aired in such a context revolted me. ..