Iran's Supreme Leader Rebuffs Ahmadinejad in Gas Row

The political authority of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, suffered a serious blow today after the country's most powerful figure sided with MPs by ordering him to supply cheap gas to villages undergoing power cuts amid an unexpectedly harsh winter.

In a humiliating rebuff, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader who has the final say over all state matters, ordered the enactment of a law requiring the government to provide £500m of gas supplies from emergency reserve funds.

Ahmadinejad had refused to implement the measure, accusing parliament of exceeding its powers in passing the bill in response to plummeting temperatures and gas cuts, which have left many areas without heating during the country's coldest winter in years.

At least 64 people are reported to have died after gas supplies were turned off in sub-zero temperatures. The cuts, belying Iran's status as possessor of the world's second biggest natural gas reserves, have provoked public outrage and threaten to turn a mood of rumbling unhappiness into a winter of discontent for Ahmadinejad.

The president, who was elected on a platform of economic justice for the poor, rejected parliament's measure on budgetary grounds and blamed the gas cuts on neighboring Turkmenistan, which has stopped supplies to Iran over a payment dispute.

But in a letter to the parliament's speaker, Gholamali Hadad-Adel, Khamenei unceremoniously overruled Ahmadinejad, writing: "All legal legislation that has gone through [the required] procedures stipulated in the constitution is binding for all branches of power."

Khamenei's intervention is the latest in a series of recent signals that he is losing patience with a president to whom he once showed staunch loyalty, defending him whenever he came under fire from political opponents.

The supreme leader once described Ahmadinejad's government as Iran's best since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but in a speech this month in the central city of Yazd, he conspicuously refrained from praising it.

Instead, he put it on a par with previous administration, saying that "the government has certain unique characteristics, but like any other government there are mistakes and shortcomings".

Reports from inside Iran suggest Khamenei has grown increasingly disenchanted with Ahmadinejad's economic record, which has been marked by surging inflation and dramatic rises in basic food and housing costs.

Such misgivings have been given added piquancy by a report last month from 16 US intelligence agencies concluding that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. The report appeared to ease the threat of American military strikes against Iran's uranium enrichment activities, which Ahmadinejad had used to silence opponents and clamp down on domestic dissent.

The diminishing external threat appears to have emboldened the president's opponents in the run up to parliamentary elections on March 14. It may also have removed the need for Khamenei to keep his displeasure quiet.

Previously the supreme leader had condemned criticism of Ahmadinejad as undermining national unity in the face of "enemy" threats.

But in a possible sign of his changing attitude, Khamenei recently appointed Mohammad Zolghadr as deputy head of the armed forces for Basij just weeks after Ahmadinejad sacked him as deputy interior minister.