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Boris Johnson’s job will be on the line if jailed London mother Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is given a higher sentence, the Standard has been told.

The charity worker’s family are expecting a new court hearing in Iran within days. There are fears that the Foreign Secretary’s blunder last week in saying that she had been “training journalists” in the country could be used as an excuse to keep her behind bars there for even longer.

Senior sources say Mr Johnson may struggle to remain in his Cabinet post if the Iranian authorities extend Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s jail term beyond the current five-year sentence and link this to the Foreign Secretary’s unguarded remarks.

British diplomats today stepped up action to raise support for Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 38. Ambassador Nicholas Hopton said the Government had “no doubt” that she was on holiday when she was arrested at Tehran airport in April last year.

Sir Simon Gass, a former British ambassador to Iran who was political director at the Foreign Office from 2013 until last year, told BBC radio: “It’s clear that the Foreign Secretary misspoke and his statements after that have said as much.

“What needs to happen is that the British Government needs to be talking very privately to the Iranian government. All my experience of these sort of issues with Iran are that the more you say in public, the more difficult it becomes in private. I’m in no doubt that the Iranians know what the real position is, whatever they may say about Mr Johnson’s comments.”

Today a survivor of the prison where Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe is being held claimed it is a “black hole of evil” where women have been tortured and beaten. Marina Nemat spent two years in sprawling Evin prison in the foothills of northern Tehran.

In an interview with the Standard, she appealed to Britons to keep Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s hopes alive by campaigning for her release from Evin.

“It was a black hole of human-made evil, which had sucked you in,” said Ms Nemat, who now lives in Canada. “I just want her to know she’s not forgotten. She just needs to hang in there because it will come to an end — she will come home. She has to believe that.

“Being forgotten is the worst thing in prison because you feel you have been wiped from the end of the Earth.”

Ms Nemat was rounded up by Iranian police in 1982 aged 16 alongside her classmates and accused of criticising the regime. She was tortured by having her feet beaten with cables by guards.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who holds dual Iranian-British citizenship, has been in Evin since June 2016, shortly after she was arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard at the end of her family holiday. She was separated from her daughter Gabriella, who is now three and living with her grandparents in Tehran.

Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, from Hampstead, was charged with trying to topple the Iranian regime, which she denies. She has been suicidal and on hunger strike and months in solitary confinement have left her physically weakened.

Now she is on the women’s wing and living in cramped conditions alongside some of Iran’s leading political activists, journalists and artists serving long sentences. Reports of sex assaults, violence and beatings have dogged Evin for decades and it was internationally condemned in 2003 when Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi-Ahmadabadi was reportedly beaten to death there.

Ms Nemat, now in her fifties and an author, said: “Back then it was a given that you would be tortured. They took me in a small room and took off my socks and shoes and lashed the soles of my feet. I’m not saying they are doing the same thing to Nazanin but it was, and is, common.”

Amnesty International has criticised the women’s wing for denying prisoners medical care and proper food, and human rights campaigners in Iran call its curbs on visiting rights “cruel”.

Last week Mr Johnson told a Commons committee that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been “simply teaching people journalism” in Iran. His words are believed to have been cited when she was taken back to court on November 4, raising fears that her sentence could be lengthened from five to up to 16 years.

On Tuesday, amid criticism, Mr Johnson told the Commons that he had been talking about Iranian allegations that Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists and backed her family and employer in saying that she had been on holiday.