Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of imprisoned British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, has accused Boris Johnson of making mistakes and false promises that enabled Iranian authorities to discredit the case for her release. Ratcliffe, who is on hunger strike outside the Iranian embassy in London, described a potential Johnson premiership as a threat to national security.
Ratcliffe said a story in the Sun newspaper, published on the day he met Johnson as foreign secretary, gave him false hope and antagonised the Iranians. The article claimed Johnson had secured a Whitehall agreement to repay a £400m debt owed by the UK government to Iran from the sale of Chieftain tanks in the 1970s. Ratcliffe said this briefing was more damaging than Johnson's earlier mistake at a foreign affairs select committee hearing, where he stated Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been teaching journalism in Tehran.
Zaghari-Ratcliffe's MP, Tulip Siddiq, challenged Johnson to explain his role in the briefing. She said: “If Boris Johnson claims that he or his team was not responsible for briefing the debt payment story then he should publicly deny it – as it seemed to be attempting to relieve the pressure caused by his own gaffe.” She added that if Johnson suggested payment was imminent, he “cruelly raised the hopes of the families involved and made matters much worse by failing to deliver.”
Ratcliffe accused Tehran of using his wife's jailing as a pawn in a wider diplomatic battle over the tank debt and the Iran nuclear deal. He said Johnson's mistake at the committee hearing was still being used by Iranian news outlets to justify a second set of charges against her. “It was used to justify the second court case. It did not cause the second court case, but was used to justify it and has been used to discredit her ever since,” Ratcliffe said.
