When news broke of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, it had been 2,173 days since her arrest at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport on April 3, 2016. Every day since, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, has been counting. At this morning’s conference Nazanin said that her freedom felt like “too much to absorb...I sometimes ask myself, is it real? Or is it part of the nightmare/ dreams I was having for such a long time?” Ratcliffe looked on as if he too could barely believe it.
When I first interviewed Richard in a car park outside the Iranian Embassy in 2017, he told me quite matter-of-factly, that it had been 544 days since he’d seen his wife and child (at this point, their daughter Gabriella was also detained in Iran). There was something in his precise tallying that gave Richard a degree of certitude in spite of what he called “the craziness” that had been their story so far. That evening all those years ago, I watched as Free Nazanin campaigners tied yellow balloons to a nearby tree, the autumn light fading into dusk. “She made this,” he said quietly, reaching into a pocket and pulling out a small woodblock carving, revealing two figures cradling their child, the mother’s hair wrapped around them like a great wave. “That’s me, that’s her — and that’s Gabriella,” he smiled. Nazanin had made it for Father’s Day.
Over the last five years, I have met Richard six times – sometimes to interview him, sometimes just for a coffee in the lull between headlines. He was always looking for new angles to keep Nazanin’s story alive – and so was I. At the heart of this six-year diplomatic wrangle over a £400 million debt is a deeply personal story of one family’s heartbreak, their separation and their grief. When Nazanin travelled to Iran in 2016, neither she nor Richard could possibly predict the devastating events that would follow, turning their world upside down. The holiday had been a family reunion. Nazanin, a 37-year-old project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, travelling on a dual passport, had taken her (then) 22-month-old daughter to Tehran for Nowruz, a festival that marks Persian New Year. As she was boarding a flight home to London, she was seized by members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard and placed in solitary confinement. “It is now nearly two months since I saw or held my little girl. I cannot get her back: her passport is confiscated, I have no visa, and I have been advised not to try and go to Iran,” Richard was quoted in the Guardian weeks later. In September 2016, Nazanin was sentenced to five years on ‘non-specific’ charges that related tenuously to national security.
For Richard, the focus – in spite of every nonsensical twist and turn – has always been passionately clear: how to get his wife home. The path to freedom has never been easy and yet from the earliest days of Nazanin’s imprisonment, his voice has remained firm, calm and informed – a conscious amalgamation that has ensured her senseless story has always been lucidly told. Time after time, Richard has expressed his defiance in spite of the many naysayers who encouraged him to stand quietly on the sidelines, allowing the politicians to make their chess moves. When Richard decided to go public about his wife’s arrest, overriding Foreign Office advice, this softly spoken accountant from Hampstead quickly showed Westminster his mettle.
“Sometimes it’s felt like I’ve been shouting at the wall, trying to tell our story. Why isn’t this on the front page?” Richard asked me in November 2017, a few months after his first Iranian Embassy vigil. By this point, he had become attuned to the erraticness of the British media; to when something is “news” – and when it is not. A person needs to feel safe enough in order to be angry, he told me, in response to those who regularly queried how he kept so calm – although Boris Johnson’s “gaff” had acutely challenged this. Just a few weeks earlier, Johnson (then foreign secretary) had incorrectly told a foreign affairs select committee that Nazanin was “simply teaching people journalism as I understand it”. He hadn’t understood it (Richard and Nazanin had underlined time and time again that she wasn’t a journalist and had never taught journalism) – and his blunder dangerously stoked Iran’s false claims, putting Nazanin at further risk.
Richard responded the only way he knew how – through careful research, tenacious lobbying and tireless activity. There’s a reason that Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, called her constituent “a relentless campaigner” in 2021. In the years that followed our first meeting, I became familiar with his press releases, pages of text that arrived in my inbox, packed full of meticulous updates and quotes, often distributed to campaigners and journalists in the early hours of the morning. In 2018, Richard presented a submission to the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. “I’ve said before that I think her treatment amounts to torture,” he subsequently told me in an interview. “Now I’m asking the UN to make their judgement.”
From poetry readings to evening vigils, and from choral events to comedy nights and theatre productions, Richard has left no stone unturned in his bid to keep his beloved wife in the public’s hearts and minds. He has demonstrated an astute understanding of the pitfalls of compassion fatigue and what that means for Nazanin. “Part of my job is to be annoying to both governments,” Richard explained in May 2018, “to say, listen, I will be a thorn in your side until you solve this.” During the course of that interview, he likened the fight to free his wife to climbing a very steep staircase. For every tentative step he took, Richard explained, he was acutely aware of the risks – and of what might be lost in the process.
He climbed them regardless. When Richard discovered the link between his wife’s imprisonment and an unpaid £400 million military debt that the UK owed Iran, he refused to stay quiet about it. He also ensured that the wider story of multiple dual-nationals held hostage (dual-nationals such as Anoosheh Ashoori, a retired engineer, who was arrested in 2017 and was also released alongside Nazanin this week) was uncovered, reported and told. And all the while, this dogged determinedness belied the trauma coursing beneath. A father and husband wrenched away from the family he once had. Of his daughter, he quietly said in 2018, “She’s not the chubby baby that travelled out, she’s a little girl.”
In the absence of answers and momentum, in the summer of 2019, Richard and Nazanin made the ultimate sacrifice, they embarked on a simultaneous hunger strike. Her in Evin prison, him outside the Iranian Embassy. Over the course of those two weeks, I watched the comings and goings in South Kensington with a notepad and pen. As the days multiplied, so did the multicoloured Post-It notes that dappled a barricade of corrugated fencing that Iranian Embassy officials had built to separate themselves from the hullabaloo on their doorstep. Politicians came and went, across the political spectrum, standing awkwardly in line to shake hands with a starving man.
A few weeks later, a visibly emotional Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, gave a tender speech that was addressed directly to Richard. “I was struck by your quite extraordinary stoicism and forbearance,” he began. “A standard to which, in such circumstances, any of us could aspire, but I suspect, none of us would obtain.” This sentiment was echoed by the former foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, on the day of Nazanin’s release. In a Sky News interview, he paid tribute to a man “who has campaigned so ceaselessly. He’s the kind of person who shows politicians what they need to do”.
Such stoicism hasn’t come without a cost over the years. As he explained all the way back in 2017: “This week, I’ve barely spoken to Gabriella because, by the time I’ve finished my media work, it’s too late in Iran, because they’re three hours ahead.”
A few months after the couple’s hunger strike in 2019, he revealed he hadn’t yet returned to his day job as an accountant and that the hunger strike had knocked him in ways he hadn’t expected. By this point his daughter Gabriella was about to return to the UK after three-and-a-half years of living in Iran with her grandparents. He would have to learn to be a father, he remarked. A devastating sentence that painfully illustrated the nightmare he, his wife and his daughter were living. Years of firefighting had stretched Richard like a rubber band – a tension one could see in spite of his patient stoicism. He returned to work and would often expressed the gratitude he felt for his employer who understood the extraordinary pressure he was under, and gave him the time he needed to keep the Free Nananin momentum going.
Despite his physical and emotional exhaustion, he kept chipping away. In 2019, Richard published an open letter - a letter he had privately sent to Johnson - calling on the recently appointed Prime Minister to meet him to discuss his wife’s release. By the day of its wider publication, it had remained unanswered for two weeks. The content of the correspondence was damning – from diplomatic slip-ups to broken promises and what he called “convenient smokescreens”. He directly referred to his recent joint hunger strike – and to Boris Johnson’s personal failings. “Sleeping hungry on the street, I took issue with your refusal to accept your share of responsibility for Nazanin’s suffering,” he wrote. “Of course, politics is full of placebo promises. But promises made lightly by politicians can still weigh heavy on the shoulders of others.”
Between November 2019 and the next time we met to discuss Nazanin’s case face-to-face, much had changed – and yet one glaringly obvious thing hadn’t. Nazanin still wasn’t free. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Nazanin was temporarily released, ordered to wear an ankle tag and forbidden from travelling more than 300 metres from her parents’ home. I met Richard post-lockdown in September 2020. As we sipped coffees in Borough, Richard seesawed between the political and the domestic; a swinging duality I had become familiar with. Similarly to every conversation we ever had, Richard talked fondly of his wife and shared both funny and heartrending anecdotes about Gabriella, now at school, and acutely aware of her friends’ mums who waited outside the gates to pick them up from school.
The next time I saw Richard it was 2021 and he was camping on a pavement in Westminster, starving himself once more – this time in freezing November temperatures. In lieu of a government gameplan, he pitched up a tent opposite the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Going without food, he told me, to remind his Government of the pledges they had made. “It’s colder this time round,” he remarked with a smile, clasping a picture of Nazanin as photographers flashed and clicked. On Day 17 he was, in his own words, “wearied” and “tired”. From my perspective as on onlooker, he seemed more determined than ever.
During one of our early interviews, Richard quoted his favourite Massive Attack lyric: “love is a verb, it’s a doing word”. It’s a lyric that he scrawled in multicoloured felt tip pen on day 21 of his hunger strike, the day he ended his protest. Over the last six years, it’s a lyric that has come to succinctly encapsulate Richard and Nazanin’s enduring bond – an indestructible love story that has reminded us of the potential we all have in us, as individuals, to affect change.
In the early hours of this morning, Richard tweeted a joyous photograph of his reunited family from the Free Nazanin account he set up in May 2016. “No place like home,” it read – as the thousands of likes racked up and up. True to form, he thanked all the others who had made his wife’s freedom possible. His last five words: “You have made us whole.”
