Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, jailed in Iran for 18 months, had a chance to be home for Christmas before Boris Johnson’s careless interference. Her husband says he is not angry but is finding it increasingly difficult to cope

Famous people often swear that they never read their own reviews. Some are lying, but as the policy is manifestly wise, on the whole, I believe them. I cannot, however, recall anyone claiming to apply the same rule to their interviews – until now. Richard Ratcliffe will not read this, he tells me, because “I just don’t expose myself to what I can’t control”. That the only interviewee indifferent to public image should be one for whom publicity is a literal matter of life or death is an obvious irony. But then, almost everything about Ratcliffe’s story is a bitter or bewildering irony.

We first met last year, after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard had seized his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe as she was about to board a flight home with the couple’s then 19-month-old daughter, Gabriella. The Foreign Office had advised him to keep quiet, but after five weeks the mild-mannered accountant lost faith in the strategic silence that appeared to be getting him nowhere, and took the unilateral risk to go public. That this stunningly self-possessed and sympathetic character could be considered a diplomatic liability struck me then as absurd – and 19 months later his measured composure is even more remarkable, when the foreign secretary’s own carelessness has put Ratcliffe’s wife in danger of seeing her five-year sentence increased to 16 years.

Unlike Boris Johnson, Ratcliffe maintains an extraordinary degree of self-discipline. Not once during our two-hour conversation does he afford himself the luxury of an emotion – “this is not the time to feel” – even though he has campaigned tirelessly for 18 months to “tell our story from the heart, and try to get people to care”. Public opinion is hard to win over, however, when “people think there’s no smoke without fire. That’s why the foreign secretary’s recent comments have been so problematic.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was jailed in Iran after visiting her family there last year. Photograph: PA

And yet, even after Johnson told the foreign affairs select committee that she had been “training journalists” in Iran, erroneously corroborating Tehran’s suspicions of sedition, Ratcliffe resists the temptation to demand his resignation, but is trying to leverage Johnson’s disgrace instead. The strategic logic of this is obvious. The self-control to pull it off is highly unusual.

“We’ve seen a different dynamic in the last couple of weeks,” offers Ratcliffe. “Because we’ve got so much bigger. Immeasurably bigger in the media.” It is, he concedes, surreal to find his family’s fate tangled up with public feeling about Boris. “But it’s with Brexit too. Some of the most extreme trolls are saying: ‘Why are you making this Boris’s fault?’ They’re essentially defending Brexit. But you know, we live in angry times. The Foreign Office’s advice is: stay away from politics. And you think, how on earth can you do that?”

Ratcliffe didn’t even vote in the referendum; all that matters to him is that Johnson now has a personal interest in helping his wife. “I think it really helps.” When the two men met this week there was no mention of his error. I ask if Johnson appeared penitent. “No. But engaged.” Does the Ratcliffes’ plight feel more hopeful than it did before Johnson’s error? “I think it’s much faster-moving. I think there’s generally ... I think, for me, the fear was always inertia. And we’re not in that space now.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ratcliffe said Boris Johnson was not penitent for his error when they met, but is now engaged in his wife’s plight. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/AFP/Getty Images

“I think the government has limited energy and would rather solve other things. The Iranian government’s got limited energy too, and would rather solve other problems. And the Revolutionary Guard are happy to wait. So the only people who don’t have time are us. And Nazanin is the one who pays the price for a waiting game. So it’s always been important to me to try to add some urgency.”

The FCO – and Ratcliffe’s father-in-law in Tehran – disagree. Does Ratcliffe ever panic in the middle of the night that his “dirty laundry diplomacy” strategy of “putting it all out there” is a mistake?

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband meets Boris Johnson Read more

“Well, it is counter-intuitive to think that doing nothing would work. There are not many spheres of life in which it does. My father-in-law is sure that doing something is making it worse.” He allows a dry chuckle. “He’s not wrong, to be honest. My plan has not yet delivered results. Except, perhaps for the fact that Nazanin knows I care and that we care. Instrumentally, who knows what works? But I do know that Nazanin is sitting in her prison cell knowing that people are shouting for her and rooting for her, and that’s profoundly important. So I do know I’m helping her to know she’s not alone.”

During her first month in prison, she was held in solitary confinement “and told her husband had abandoned her and was going to take her daughter away”. She was “in a room with a light on all the time, no window – you don’t get to see anyone else except your interrogator, you’re being told relentlessly that you’ve been abandoned, there’s no contact, you don’t get to hear any news, it’s complete sensory deprivation. It doesn’t take many days before you’ll believe anything. But she knows that stuff’s not true now.”

Play Video 0:35 Boris Johnson: 'I apologise to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family' – video

Until five weeks ago, Ratcliffe imagined his campaign for her release was more symbolic than material. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m keeping my promise to keep campaigning, but actually it’s from a position of complacency’.” After serving a third of her sentence, with good behaviour she would have been eligible for parole next week. “She’ll be home by Christmas,” he thought. The shock of fresh charges carrying a sentence of up to 16 years “blindsided” him, and “devastated” her. As ever, the judicial process was bafflingly opaque. But having been assigned the “mildest” judge, and then taken to the dentist when she was due to come before him, she and her husband began to hope the fresh charges were an empty threat. “It was in the balance as to whether this goes forward or not.” But then Johnson gave his evidence to the select committee. “Suddenly it wasn’t in the balance any more, and she was in front of the judge who’d tried her original case.”

Is he furious with the Iranian authorities? “No space for rage,” he murmurs. He feels no anger towards Iran, “because it’s so far off the page – we’re in a different moral register. But with this government I have expectations, and sometimes it feels like they’ve not been entirely honest with me. So that’s the bit that will provoke me. So for instance, Michael Gove saying, ‘I don’t know [why Nazanin was in Iran when she was arrested].” Ratcliffe wrote to the FCO, and Downing Street issued a clarification. “You’ve got some citizen reminding cabinet ministers of what their own policy is. Mental.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ratcliffe and his family’s supporters took part in a protest earlier this month outside parliament. Photograph: Paul Davey / Barcroft Images

Why did Gove say he didn’t know? “I don’t know. I haven’t stopped to try to work it out. It wasn’t the worst thing that happened that day.”

The worst thing was the news that Nazanin had found lumps in her breasts. She has now seen a specialist, had an ultrasound, and will learn the results when she sees another specialist this week. She has a family history of breast cancer, but Ratcliffe is more worried about her mental health. “When I say she is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I’m not being melodramatic.”

Contact between the couple during their first year apart was so “sporadic” that they could go two months without talking. Nazanin is now allowed to call him every Sunday, and can use other inmates’ unwanted phone time to call at other times, but gets angry if he doesn’t pick up. “She can be very volatile.”

The mystery to me is why Ratcliffe isn’t going mad, too. He couldn’t sleep in the early weeks, but manages to do so now without pills. He hasn’t taken to drink or smoking, or any other vice, nor found solace in therapy or even exercise. How does he unwind? Where does he find any pleasure? “What do I do to get away from it? Probably go back to old friends and spaces from before. I’ll go for a drink with old school friends, or people who knew us way back. Old and trusted friends.” He’s not, he grins ruefully, much of a friend himself these days. “There’s something almost a bit like grief, in that I’m on my own journey, and I need energy and then I walk off. I need energy again – and then I walk off again. It’s not like I’m giving back.” He doesn’t go to the cinema or theatre, and “I don’t really have the sustained concentration to read a book”.

I wonder what, if anything, he can register beyond Nazanin. What, for instance, does he know about Harvey Weinstein? “Barely anything. I’d see his picture on the news and think: why isn’t my wife on the news, because that’s more important! I am in my own world. Someone said it’s raining today, but I didn’t notice. I can go out and I’m surprised it’s cold; I shouldn’t be if I’d bothered to check the weather forecast, but I didn’t. I’m in my own world. I mean, there was this whole thing on the news this morning about a sausage roll in a nativity thing? Not sure I see why that’s an outrage.”

Ratcliffe with Nazanin and their daughter Gabriella, who is living with Nazanin’s grandparents in Iran. Ratcliffe has applied for a visa to visit his daughter but has had no response. Photograph: Reuters

His job as a City auditor went out the window for the first three months of Nazanin’s captivity. “The next three I’d go in, but not really do very much.” Since September he has been back at work full-time, “But at times when stuff’s happening I’m more distracted.” Nazanin frets about the family’s finances and worries about him losing his job. “She worries about the mortgage getting paid. She wants a home to come home to.” But Ratcliffe’s employer is “very, very understanding”, accommodating his absences and distractions while keeping him on full pay.

But if a semblance of professional normality is sustainable, no plausible imitation of family life feels possible. Last Christmas, all Ratcliffe could focus on was his wife’s appeal in January. Thinking there was “every chance” she and Gabriella would soon be home, he wanted to wait until they could celebrate it together, but was persuaded in the end to join his parents in Hampshire. “Mr Grinch in the corner, not adding much to it.”

She lost her appeal. Ratcliffe has not seen his daughter in 19 months – half her life. He applied for a visa to visit Iran and see her, but has received no response. At one point, the prison authorities issued an ultimatum; either Gabriella went to live with Nazanin in prison, or the child would be sent back to the UK. Her mother fought both options, and eventually won twice weekly prison visits with her daughter, and the right for the child to live with her grandparent’s at their home. Gabriella’s grandparents speak only Farsi, and by now she has forgotten all English apart from “I love you’” and “see you tomorrow”. Ratcliffe talks to her on Skype three times a week, with her uncle on hand to translate, but accepts that he is no longer a meaningful parent but more an abstract idea. Gabriella understands that her mum is in prison, and knows she isn’t supposed to tell anyone, but tends to forget. “Oh, she’s in prison,” she’ll offer breezily to a stranger in the park who asks where’s her mother.

The only time Ratcliffe visibly relaxes is when he talks about his daughter. “Gabriella was telling her mum a few weeks ago that she told her English teacher: ‘I live with my granny and I visit my mummy in another place. I didn’t say you were in prison! I said you were in another place.’ She was very pleased with herself.”

She thinks, he says with a wan smile, that her dad is in prison, too. It strikes me that she isn’t wrong. “She said she’s been praying to God for Mummy and Daddy to be released from prison.”