The ruling was the latest act in a high-level feud between Ahmadinejad and a group of hard-line rivals who say he is in the grip of a “deviant current” of advisers trying to undermine the role of the clergy in the Islamic establishment.

The ruling was reported two days before a parliamentary election which, as most leading reformist parties have been banned, will be largely a contest between hard-line conservative factions

“The president’s media adviser, Ali Akbar Javanfekr, has been sentenced to one year in prison and banned from engaging in political activities for five years for insulting the Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,” Fars said.

It gave no further details of the offense.

In November, Javanfekr was sentenced at a separate trial to six months in prison and banned from practising journalism for three years for publishing an article about Islamic dress that the court ruled was offensive to public decency.

Ahmadinejad’s allies want to secure a majority in the assembly in Friday’s election to bolster his chances of winning a presidential vote in 2013.

The election will be the first test of the clerical establishment’s popularity since the presidential vote in 2009 that critics say was rigged to ensure Ahmadinejad’s re-election.

The disputed election and its aftermath plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the 1979 Islamic revolution and created a rift among the hard-line rulers that has since widened.

The divisions surfaced in April last year when Khamenei reinstated an intelligence minister Ahmadinejad had sacked.

Since then parliament and the judiciary, run by Ahmadinejad’s rivals, have moved against the president, with lawmakers threatening to impeach him and prosecutors arresting some people on the fringes of his faction.