The numbers coming out of Tehran have never been reliable. But this is different. This is a chasm.
Casualty figures from the Iran conflict are now being described by Whitehall sources as 'impossible to verify'. The official count, they say, is a political document. Not a ledger of the dead.
One senior intelligence figure told me: 'We have sat estimates from three different agencies. They do not agree. Not on the order of magnitude. Not on the baseline. The fog of war is now a fog of deliberate obfuscation.'
Inside the Ministry of Defence, there is a quiet admission that the true toll may never be known. The Iranians have always played a long game on information. They know that a number, once published, becomes a weapon.
But here is what the Westminster lobby is whispering: the war is not going according to plan. The casualty spike is not a bug. It is a feature of a strategy that has gone wrong.
Opposition MPs are pressing for a Commons debate. They want a statement. They will get a carefully worded denial, a promise of 'ongoing assessment', and a request to trust the process.
No one in the room will believe it.
The real story is not the number of dead. It is the number of stories that will never be told. The families who will never know. The memorials that will never be built.
And in Whitehall, they know this. They just won't say it out loud.
