The Pretender and the Flour Mill: Iran’s Exiled Prince Gets a Reality Check

According to Saed News, in the murky theatre of Iranian exilic politics, few performances are quite as surreal as the imagined comeback of Reza Pahlavi, the self-styled heir to the defunct Peacock Throne. Saeed Laylaz, a senior member of Iran’s Executives of Construction Party and a political economist with little patience for delusion, recently poured cold water on such speculation with an acerbic dose of realism. “I once doubted,” he said, “that the poor fellow could manage the Tehran Flour Company. Then foreign pundits started debating whether he might be up to running the entire grain sector.”

This remark, delivered with a tone somewhere between satire and exasperation, comes in the wake of Iran’s brief but high-stakes confrontation with Israel. Following Tehran’s “Besharat al-Fath” operation—an act of retaliatory choreography that saw drones and missiles launched toward Israeli territory—Iran has emerged from twelve days of brinkmanship not with victory parades, but with something arguably more valuable: a rare flicker of national cohesion.

Mr Laylaz, no firebrand himself, was visibly surprised. “I expected more criticism from the people, not less. Yet here they were—bruised by years of injustice and economic strain—still rushing to the front line to defend the homeland,” he said. His remarks reflect a quiet truth that foreign capitals often miss: despite the Islamic Republic’s flaws—and there are many—national pride still runs deeper than imported democracy brochures.

For Laylaz, the crisis offered a clarifying moment. Israel and its allies, he argued, misjudged Iran’s internal resolve in the same way Hitler miscalculated Soviet Russia’s in 1941. “They thought they’d kick down the door and the house would crumble. But Iran is not some post-colonial construct—it’s a civilisation-state with a stubborn sense of sovereignty.”

Sovereignty, indeed, is the operative word. Laylaz insists that America’s quarrel with Iran is less about theology and turbans than about Tehran’s refusal to be house-trained. “The Americans can live with dictators. They can live with monarchies, theocracies, and democracies—so long as they’re compliant. What they cannot tolerate is independence.”

And yet, Laylaz was not merely rallying behind the flag. His warning was twofold. First, that the Islamic Republic should not mistake this moment of public solidarity for a blank cheque. And second, that internal reform is not a luxury—it is a survival strategy. “We have the chance to rebuild political legitimacy,” he argued, “but only if we tackle corruption, bureaucracy, and distrust.”

The true enemy, in Laylaz’s telling, is not Reza Pahlavi or any other YouTube oppositionist in exile—it is inertia. “We can no longer afford to look inward with contempt and outward with fantasy. There is no cavalry coming from abroad, only cameras and coup plots.”

With one final thrust of rhetorical steel, Laylaz reminded listeners that even flawed self-rule trumps foreign tutelage. “The worst national government,” he said, “is still better than the most gilded puppet regime.”

In Iran, irony is not just a rhetorical device—it is a survival mechanism. Laylaz wields it well. The prince may still haunt the studios of London and Los Angeles, but back home, even the flour mills appear safe from his touch.