AFTER 15 years as a Conservative Member of the European Parliament for Scotland, Struan Stevenson is best remembered in his homeland for tilting at wind farms. He was opposed to strengthening carbon dioxide emission targets in the European Union and published So Much Wind: The Myth of Green Energy, in he which criticised the Scottish Government for its green energy “obsession”.

Stevenson, however, was also President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq and worked closely with the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), an Iranian opposition group in exile. He first made contact with the PMOI in 2004 when he was shocked by the public hanging of a 16-year-old girl in Iran and travelled to its base in Auvers-sur-Oise.

In France, Stevenson met with Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a political coalition that includes the PMOI. He was clearly smitten by Mrs Rajavi and makes a list of her qualities, some of which (“a presence that can captivate a crowd”) could only have been apparent to him later. The PMOI was still listed as a terrorist organisation and its compound had been raided by the French security police. Rajavi informed the MEP that the “terror tag” should be removed as a matter of urgency. She also described the plight of the 3,400 PMOI members who departed Iran in the 1980s and were living in Camp Ashraf, north east of Baghdad.

The visit to France was definitive for Stevenson. His subsequent commitment to the PMOI is as unqualified as his admiration for Maryam Rajavi. The PMOI renounced violence in 2001 but the terrorist designation proved tenacious, despite the fact that the organisation was credited with revealing Iran’s nuclear programme in 2002. The EU finally removed the proscription in 2009 followed by the US in September 2012 and Canada three months later. In the meantime, Stevenson lobbied for the PMOI in Brussels and Washington, addressed rallies and invited sympathetic speakers. He also became a spokesman for the plight of the people in Camp Ashraf who had suffered a series of brutal attacks and were eventually moved to Camp Liberty and deprived of the infrastructure they had built up in Ashraf.

One can’t help but admire Stevenson’s courage in taking this on. He could have lived on the royalties of a million Panda jokes when, as President of the Fisheries Committee, he provided the template by observing that Scottish cod stocks were as endangered as Tory MPs. Instead, he immersed himself in the deadly serious business of Iran/Iraq relations and was warned off by MI5 and labelled a stooge for his troubles. Still, there are aspects of his book that are a bit disconcerting.

The structure alternates his chapters with the testimony of PMOI survivors of Iranian torture, which makes an impartial reading of the Stevenson-penned sections virtually impossible. The running narrative has no formal sourcing and no indication of where some of the information came from. Stevenson also believes in moral absolutes. There are only two groups: good and those who support it and evil and those who abet it. The first is the PMOI camp which includes him. The second is the Iranian Mullahs and their enablers: supine western governments, “murderous” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouris al-Maliki, Chamberlainesque appeaser Jack Straw, and so on.

Perhaps this is the way Iran/Iraq needs to be read, but it is a recipe for glossing. The PMOI may be the best hope for the future of Iran, as Stevenson posits, and he is right to condemn websites whose sole purpose is to discredit the movement. But there is still a legitimate debate to be had about its history. Apart from dismissing attacks on American personnel in the 1970s as the work of a Marxist faction, Stevenson accepts the commitment to non-violence at face value and his brief history of the PMOI reads like propaganda even if it isn’t. American lawyer/journalist Glenn Greenwald and others have also suggested that the PMOI’s high-profile supporters in the US were well-paid for their advocacy. Stevenson gleefully lists these supporters without mentioning this. Predictably, Stevenson has no time for Glasgow Caledonian University graduate Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran. Some believe that Rouhani is a relatively progressive president constrained by the Ayatollahs. To Stevenson, he is a ceremonial figure and a “supposed moderate” that the west has fallen in love with.