The UK’s diplomatic problems with Iran have featured mutual expulsions of diplomats:

Britain is to expel two Iranian diplomats as a tit-for-tat response after Iran forced the same number of British diplomats to leave, Gordon Brown revealed this afternoon.

"It is with regret that I should inform the House that Iran yesterday took the unjustified step of expelling two British diplomats over allegations which are absolutely without foundation," Mr Brown told MPs.

"In response to that action, we informed the Iranian ambassador today that we would expel two Iranian diplomats from their embassy in London. I am disappointed that Iran has placed us in this position."

But names of the expellees are not given.

Why not?

Tradition?

Spy Blog last year tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to get names of diplomats expelled in the UK/Russia tit-for-tat expulsions. But they failed:

Every foreign Embassy in London and in Moscow, and therefore every other Government and intelligence agency in the world, will have been informed, directly or indirectly which of their fellow accredited diplomats were expelled, if only for official protocol and seating arrangement purposes at formal functions and ceremonies

Actually, this is not correct. It would not be the custom in Moscow or London or anywhere else to spread around the diplomatic community the names of those concerned.

Partly because it’s just not done that way. And partly because in fact when people are expelled there is often a process of oddly polite but private negotiation about how/when it happens.

See my own account of the expulsion of various UK diplomats from Moscow in 1996 and how the Brits responded (at page 29 or so). The expellee(s) may be allowed to leave in lesiurely time for personal reasons or when the posting concerned comes to its expected normal end, depending on how the whole business is being done.

Which is why amateur detective work as done by Spy Blog of comparing successive Diplomatic Lists to try to guess who might have been ejected does not really work.

That said, the reasons given to Spy Blog for not revealing the names are pretty feeble.

And in this UK/Iran case, once again the public may never know who has been heaved out from where…