Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup, by Christopher de Bellaigue, Bodley Head, RRP£20, 320 pages

Muhammad Mossadegh was overthrown as the elected prime minister of Iran in an Anglo-American coup in August 1953. He had presumed to nationalise the country’s oil industry, and yet he was an improbable nationalist hero. Highly strung, prone to epic sulks and infuriating inertia, as well as ecstasies of hypochondria punctuated by histrionic public swoons, Mossadegh ran his final, fated government mostly from his bed, conducting cabinet meetings in his pyjamas.

Not for this constitutional nationalist the martial strut of a Gamal Abdel Nasser, the tragic and tarnished idol of the Arab masses. Even though Nasser got away with his nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, and Mossadegh was undone by neocolonial intrigue, it is the Persian patriot rather than the Egyptian putschist whose star burns brighter more than half a century on – a “statue in men’s hearts” and a “spectral presence” in Iran’s political culture, as Christopher de Bellaigue puts it.

Patriot of Persia, by a British Persian scholar and journalist with deep experience of Iran, is a rich and timely immersion in that culture. The struggle for control of Iran’s oil industry is more than subliminally present in the current conflict between Iran and much of the world over its nuclear ambitions, the mullahs having manipulated the right to enrich uranium into a modern proxy of the sovereign right to own the country’s oil wealth.

Mossadegh was a princeling of the decadent Qajar dynasty, under which Iran had become a plaything of Britain and Russia through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The spendthrift Qajars, always short of funds, ceded much to the predatory Europeans, notably the British oil concession that evolved into the Anglo-Persian (later renamed Anglo-Iranian) oil company, the origin of BP.

From the first world war, control of Persian oil was vital to British imperial interests. After the second world war, amid the retreat from empire, Anglo-Iranian, with its expanded oil interests in Iraq and Kuwait, was not only a rare example of lingering British influence abroad; it was the UK’s single most valuable overseas asset, whose returns to the British exchequer far exceeded royalties to the Iranian state.

Furthermore, de Bellaigue observes, conditions inside Britain’s “concession zone” on the Gulf, though arguably as bad as many other regions of the country, were an affront to nationalists. “In 1950, the town of Abadan had only enough electricity to supply a single London street. Of 20,000 school-age children, there were places for just 2,500,” he writes.

Emerging from a system that privileged the aristocratic and clerical castes, Mossadegh came to see control of Iran’s oil as synonymous with national dignity – to the exclusion of all else once he became a politician of the masses. With his roots in Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906, in extremis he would embrace the chaotic populism of Iran in ways that undermined its shaky institutions.

Winston Churchill, who returned to power in 1951 as Iran nationalised its oil, and Anthony Eden, who would later be undone by Suez, were determined to stop the man they called Mussy Duck from starting a wave of “concession-busting”. They would draw in the cold warriors of the Eisenhower administration by exaggerating the threat posed by communists that Mossadegh was happy to tolerate in the street but not in government.

In de Bellaigue’s telling, while Britain’s rapacious duplicity was the driving force behind the coup, it was the US Central Intelligence Agency, under the local command of Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, that actually drove it through.

Mossadegh bore his share of the blame. Though an overwhelming “moral force”, de Bellaigue judges, “he was unable to strike that balance, between interests and ideals, of which a true politician is made”. He was “a mixture of visionary and fusspot”, peering into the future and poring over pedantic legalisms, in ways that prevented him from identifying “the best deal available to Iran”.

This book is full of sentences that ring like a bell, but none more so than those that tantalise us with what might have been. The Anglo-American overthrow of constitutional nationalism, however flawed, led to the tawdry Pahlavi dynasty, and that cleared the way for the theocrats of the Islamic Republic.

Mossadegh, in this warts-and-all telling, was a secular reformer, “the first to try to build a modern Middle Eastern state on the basis of collective and individual liberty”. In destroying him, de Bellaigue concludes and it is hard to disagree, “an opportunity [was] spurned because of the British obsession with lost prestige and the American obsession with communism”.

David Gardner is the FT’s international affairs editor and author of ‘Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance’ (IB Tauris)