Stephen Glover: This man is authoritarian and repressive in anyone's language

This is a story involving Channel 4, the BBC and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

On Christmas Day, Ahmadinejad delivered a seasonal message to British viewers. In the event this turned out to be an Iranian version of motherhood and apple pie. What the president said could have equally well been intoned from almost any pulpit by almost any Anglican bishop.

Whether it was such a good idea to invite him to speak is another question. In his time he has made a number of statements that would seem – though my Persian is not as good as it was – to be anti-Semitic. He is neither a friend to Britain nor a very Christmassy sort of person. I do not expect to be sued for suggesting that he is a fanatic. Why ask him to ask to address the nation at Christmas? It is just another Channel 4 stunt.

Incidentally, the channel's chairman, Luke Johnson (son of Paul, the famous columnist) is becoming a controversial figure. The younger Johnson, a multimillionaire entrepreneur, has recently been blackballed by the Garrick Club in London, several members having opposed him. My man propping up the Garrick bar says his exclusion had nothing to do with Channel 4's Ahmadinejad stunt, which was then not known about. Perhaps the vote against him would have been unanimous if it had been. Mr Johnson joins the small band of media gentlemen blackballed by the Garrick, which includes Bernard Levin and Jeremy Paxman, who was, however, later admitted.

Just as Channel 4 was honouring the president of Iran, the BBC was having its own difficulties in that country. Various news organisations, all of them non-British, have reported that on 24 December the BBC offices in Tehran were closed by the Iranian authorities. They include the respectable American magazine National Review, which reports the closure on its website. An Iranian outfit called Trend News, which presumably operates with the goodwill of the Iranian government, also reports that the BBC's offices were raided, and further claims that several non-British BBC employees were arrested.

And yet neither the BBC nor any other British media outlet has mentioned the raid. Might this be because the BBC is trying to hush up its confrontation with the Iranians for fear of being banished from Tehran? It is a tempting theory but almost certainly untrue. The BBC has absolutely denied to me that its office in Tehran was either raided or closed on Christmas Eve, and I suppose we must take its word for it. This would seem to be an example of blogs and unreliable agencies propelling a story that is untrue. It's there on the internet – take a look – but it seems not to have happened.

Nevertheless, something is clearly going on between the Iranian authorities and the BBC. Relations are not good. In the next week or two the BBC will begin to broadcast a Farsi television service from London funded by a £15m grant from the Foreign Office. The BBC World Service has had a Farsi radio service for 68 years. Many in the Iranian administration do not welcome the BBC's new television channel, which will doubtless attract an audience of millions of Iranians when it begins to broadcast eight hours a day.

If the Iranians did not close the BBC's offices in Tehran, there are elements within a notably fissiparous government that have recently been critical of the Corporation. On 24 December – the day of the alleged closure – Hossein Saffar Harandi, the Iranian Minister of Culture and Islamic Orientation, was reported by the Tehran-based Mehr news agency as threatening the BBC and other international media organisations. He was quoted as saying: "Foreign media outlets operating in Iran are being monitored, and if any of them commits an offence, it will be punished based on media law."

The Mehr news agency is unlikely to have cooked up this quote. The BBC was being threatened. However, I can see no reference to Mr Harandi's reported remarks on any BBC website in English, though they may for all I know have been reported by its Farsi radio service. Is the Corporation playing down the rupture for fear of provoking more serious retaliation? About a year ago, Nigel Chapman, the outgoing director of the BBC World Service, wrote optimistically in these pages about the new Farsi service. It is difficult to be so optimistic now.

I would not be surprised if relations between the Iranian authorities and the BBC were to deteriorate over the next few months. I suppose, if one tries for a moment to see the thing from the point of view of the Iranians, that they are suspicious because Foreign Office money is behind the new service. For all that, I doubt the BBC will be pumping out propaganda, and we should stand with the Corporation during its difficulties with Tehran. No one should doubt that the Iranian government is repressive and authoritarian. Last month it closed the Tehran office run by the Nobel Peace Prize winner and lawyer Shirin Ebadi.

President Ahmadinejad and most of his crew are not very nice people. They do not believe in a free press or in free expression. Mr Johnson's blackballing by the buffers in the Garrick may be a very good joke. Channel 4's showing of Ahmadinejad's Christmas broadcast was an extremely bad one.

Off with his head – and then back on with it again

Maynard Keynes famously said: "When the facts change, I change my mind." This would be the defence of The Guardian's star columnists Jackie Ashley and Polly Toynbee.

In a space of a few months they have gone from demanding Gordon Brown's scalp to lauding him. I imagine they would say that the facts have changed. One moment he was all at sea; the next he had taken charge of the credit crunch.

On 4 August Ms Ashley advised the Prime Minister that "the best thing would be for him to stand aside". On 15 September she foresaw the "destruction" of the Labour party as "a major force in British politics" if he remained. Yet a few weeks later he was "standing so tall [that] he almost seems to be above party politics."

Ms Toynbee veered from recommending the immediate defenestration of Mr Brown on 6 September, when the Government had the "smell of death", to declaiming five weeks later that "Brown is a good man in a crisis." She has dumped Messrs Cameron and Osborne with whom she had been flirting.

We all do it. I have contradicted myself in the space of a single article, let alone a few weeks. And yet the argument that if facts change we can change our minds only partly holds water. In this case the facts have got worse – only perceptions have improved. Mr Brown may still be leading us to disaster.

The polls have a lot to do with it. The Prime Minister has not been saved by his policies but by his improved poll standing. Columnists like winners. We are all guilty of it – some more so than others. If Mr Brown slumps again, Ms Ashley and Ms Toynbee will doubtless call for his head, forgetting that they have had it off once before, and once restored it.