RUTHFULLY YOURS

While Tony Blair was promoting his autobiography last month, his sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, was rolling around on the floor of a mosque in Iran.

She was, it has transpired, having a spiritual experience: she left the building with a vow never to eat pork or drink alcohol again.

Blair, meanwhile, was sounding off about the threat from Iran. “We have got to be prepared to confront them,” he said, “if necessary militarily. I think there is no alternative to that if they continue to develop nuclear weapons. They need to get that message loud and clear.”

Now the message to him from Iran is loud and clear: Christmas will never be the same with a friend of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad in the family. Booth works for Press TV, a propaganda channel run by the Iranian government from an office in Ealing.

In her broadcasts, Booth dons a headscarf, so it’s perhaps little surprise that this weekend she announced to an Excel arena packed with the Muslim faithful that she has joined their flock: “My name’s Lauren Booth and I’m a Muslim.” She described “the overwhelming sense of peace” she’d experienced at that mosque in the city of Qom and recalled a prayer: “Allah, thank you for putting me on this journey.”

Then she asked God to get out his diary: “If you could spare some time to look at Palestine to ease their pain, that would be great.”

Many will be dismayed Booth didn’t pray that the people of Iran be spared their pain too. It’s baffling how a journalist could visit a country with Iran’s appalling human rights record and not be moved to report on the injustices suffered by its people — such as Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who remains under threat of being stoned to death for alleged adultery. And then there’s the rape and torture used by the Iranian state to punish opposition.

She didn’t have to go to Iran: there are beautiful mosques in Britain she could have rolled about on the floor in.

Either way, her prayer for Palestine remains unanswered. Last weekend thugs in Gaza burned to the ground the already vandalised Crazy Water theme park for children, which they considered unIslamic, while the Hamas administration — which has banned women’s lingerie from shop windows and women from using water pipes — turned a blind eye.

These are Lauren Booth’s friends. In 2008, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh presented her with a “VIP” passport to Gaza; both he and Booth are backed by the Iranians.

In converting to Islam she follows in the footsteps of her Press TV colleague Yvonne Ridley, the former Express journalist who honoured a promise to her Taliban captors to adopt their religion in exchange for her release.

Cassius Clay converted to Islam and became Muhammad Ali in the context of the US civil rights struggle of the Sixties. Cat Stevens‘s conversion in the Seventies was because he believed God had saved him from drowning — and he used it to get out of the media circus. Booth is doing the opposite in that respect.

While Booth’s spiritual experience was clearly very real to her, one cannot but recall Ahmadinejad’s claim to have been visited by divinity during his maiden UN speech in 2005. One of his aides had seen him surrounded by a halo of light as he became a vessel for the message of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the world.