Jeremy Hunt on November 18 arrived in Tehran to pay his first visit to Iran since he became UK Foreign Secretary four months ago.

Top of the agenda was what viable support London and European Union member states can provide Iran in the face of the sanctions-led belligerent economic attack it is enduring from the US. Hopes are fading for the EU special purpose vehicle (SPV), which would offer European companies that want to continue doing business with Iran a way to do that without risking exposure of US secondary sanctions, because Brussels can not find a country willing to host the mechanism. Austria has backed off and the latest focus is on whether Luxembourg will succumb to pressure from EU officials to step into the breach.

Hunt, who was also expected to raise concerns about the continuing imprisonment of UK-Iranian dual nationals including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Kamal Foroughi, has previously said the British remain commited to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), informally known as the nuclear deal, which was signed by Iran and six major powers—including the US which unilaterally pulled out of the multilateral accord in early May—to shield Iran from heavy sanctions in return for compliance with measures to restrict the Islamic Republic’s nuclear development programme.

Hunt arrived in Iran two days after the Guardian published an opinion piece from British ambassador to Tehran between 2003 and 2006, Sir Richard Dalton, entitled “Trump’s economic war on Iran is doomed to failure”.

Dalton wrote: “This policy is based on the claim that Iran is a major security threat to the American people. But that is transparently exaggerated. And the statement by Mike Pompeo that sanctions will be used to ensure Iran “behaves like a normal country” is unintentionally ironic.

“The US is not a ‘normal’ country. Complicity in a horrifying aggression against Yemen and supporting the extension of Israeli colonisation of Palestine are not acts of normality. The truth is that all who intervene in the Middle East’s regional struggles, including Iran, are doing what states always have done—trying to influence outcomes in the direction of their real or perceived interests.”

In Dalton’s view, Iran is set to remain basically stable despite the surge in inflation and tough recession that the IMF says are on the way.

He added: “Discontent, and maybe protests, will significantly increase. Iran’s leaders will nevertheless try to weather the storm. The 2020 US election will be crucial for them. They could not live with a four-year extension of the crisis if Trump were to win again. Their aim will be to hunker down until then. I expect them to refrain in the meantime from provoking the US in the region or reopening closed-down parts of their nuclear infrastructure.

“Ayatollah Khamenei is uncompromising. Indeed, all of Iran’s leaders are resolute. The economic damage and popular suffering over the next two years is unlikely to be sufficient to make the government move. And, crucially, there is no internationally agreed campaign against Iran this time. The EU, for example, has designed a work-around to achieve some financial flows, though the Iranians are not relying on this ever working.”