Mr Nazanin, my hero

Richard Ratcliffe's quiet perseverance and dignity is a lesson to us all. Yes, particularly you lot in cabinet

Richard Ratcliffe was on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour this morning, telling Emma Barnett about the latest developments in the case of his wife, Nazanin Zagari-Ratcliffe, who is being held in Iran. She was sentenced in September 2016 to five years in prison on charges that have never been spelt out publicly bu relate to her purported leadership of a "foreign-linked hostile network" while she was visiting her parents, with her daughter in two. She had been detained since April 2016 — and been subjected to what America might once have called "enhanced interrogation techniques" — so the family were hoping for her return to Britain this month. Her husband, an accountant, lives with their six-year-old daughter, Gabriella. Ratcliffe told Barnett that Gabriella had made a countdown calendar, ticking off the days to her mum's return. He compared it to an Advent calendar. And then he said, calmly, that yet again he and Nazanin had "made a promise that they hadn't kept", because yesterday she was sentenced to a year in prison, plus further year of not leaving Iran, for spreading propaganda, because she had been at a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in 2009. The Iranian embassy in London.

If it were my wife being held in an unfriendly foreign country, in prison for several years, suffering indescribably and looking extremely unwell at some points, I do not know how I would keep my cool. For the new sentence is confirmation, if any were needed, that the main thing keeping Nazanin in Iran is the £400 million that the UK owes Tehran. Last Tuesday the High Court was meant to be sitting to try to resolve the matter — Tehran is claiming interest, not unreasonably, given the debt has been outstanding since 1971 — but, for what some say is the 11th time, the case was postponed. And since days later Nazanin is sentenced for a crime of which she was convicted about six weeks ago — almost as if the Iranians were waiting to see what would happen, or not happen, in the High Court. She has been staying with her Iranian parents, under house arrest, during the pandemic. Tehran has not said whether she will go back to jail.

And still Richard Ratcliffe keeps his cool; keeps calmly applying pressure where he thinks it may help; keeps getting their daughter up in the morning, brushing her hair — and letting Nazanin watch it all — before taking Gabriella to school. Superdad.

Ratcliffe told the Guardian yesterday that he had spoken to the Foreign Office on Friday and had discovered that it had not raised a "dossier" with Tehran about Nazanin's torture and mental condition for fear of offending it. He says he warned the FO last September that her release was likely to be delayed until 2023 if it continued to soft-soap the regime. And so it comes to pass. By then he will not have seen her for seven years, and for Gabriella it will have been half that time. I would mention that her appeal will be held within three weeks but it doesn't seem pertinent.

It is not as if anyone's trying to claim we don't owe the money. Iran bought a gross of Chieftain tanks from us half a century ago, but between payment and delivery, the shah was deposed, and the regime still in power now took over. And we didn't want to give tanks to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, so we didn't. But we thought we'd hold on to the money too. What could Iran possibly do? Except detain dual nationals on trumped-up charges and make them suffer horribly? It's as if I'd taken out a mortgage, discovered that the bank had subsequently invested in, say, Facebook and so told the lender I was keeping the loan and it could whistle for any repayments. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has said explicitly that we owe the money and are trying to work out how to repay it. It doesn't sound very bloody difficult to me. Here you go, Ali and Hassan, here's your 400 mill back, plus a bit of interest to say sorry for taking so long. The obstacles to repayment mentioned include trying to save the taxpayer £30 million in interest and the risk of breaking sanctions imposed on Iran. But we're the country that said it was OK to break the Brexit withdrawal agreement, so I find it hard to take that seriously.

A curious coda to this story is the transformation of Dominic Raab into an homme sérieux. It began when he had to cover for a Covidiotic Boris Johnson, who was close to croaking after successfully doing his handshaking best to catch the bug. Raab was clearly shitting himself, but he did a good job. He showed he was a safe pair of hands. The man who in former ministerial posts was so disliked by staff that they revealed he was a weirdo who ordered the same Pret lunch every day, and competed to see how many "a"s they could slip into his name in paperwork — the record was "Dominic Raaaaab" — is starting to look the only honourable and grown-up person in the cabinet. Despite his seniority, there has been little showboating from him; none of the thuggish remarks we get from Priti Patel or the clowning of other senior ministers. Ratcliffe still evinced a degree of scepticism over Raab's efforts, but acknowledged that there is at least a line of communication. Raab's boss probably made Nazanin's fate worse by wrongly and moronically claiming in 2017 that she had been working when she was arrested the previous year. Next to him Raab looks really quite sensible.