Sitting outside the Foreign Office in a picnic chair with his handmade signs, wrapped in blankets, wearing a bobble hat, Richard Ratcliffe resembled a homeless person, a crank or just one of many single-issue obsessives who haunt Westminster. His bloodshot eyes overflowed with sorrow; after 21 winter days outside without food he was hunched and frail.
How on earth, you wondered, could this self-abnegation affect geopolitics, soften hearts in an unpitying regime which hangs 300 of its own citizens a year. Yet on his final day of hunger strike, Ratcliffe held up a sign by way of explanation. “Love is a doing word,” it said.
Love isn’t just a static noun, a pink heart, a warm fuzzy feeling, an emoji. “To love” can mean to fight to the death. Ratcliffe had done all he could with his mind, his energy, his voice, to alert the world to his wife Nazanin’s false imprisonment. After five years his body was all he had left.
Did his love ultimately win Nazanin’s freedom? That is the romantic story we’d like to believe, especially when war and death fill our screens. Perhaps it was mightier forces: Trump leaving office, the West’s need for an alternative to Russian oil, a new Iranian government seizing a chance to get vast pre-revolution debts finally repaid and for wider economic gains.
But such a love story has power, forcing us to ask profound questions of ourselves: what would we do, how long would we wait? It sticks in the public mind. The daughter of 67-year-old Anoosheh Ashoori, the other freed hostage, remarked that her father’s case didn’t attract equal attention to Nazanin’s because he was elderly, his children were grown up, he was less “relatable”.
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The romantic tragedy of a man loving his wife so much he seemed prepared to die brought celebrities down to sit with him, and it alerted Liz Truss, Britain’s most publicity-savvy politician, who upped diplomatic efforts, reaping her rewards on Wednesday night.
Yet what a mighty burden it is to turn yourself into a national love story. Richard Ratcliffe, a self-effacing accountant, so obviously uneasy with the spotlight, reminds me of Jill Morrell, the girlfriend of the Beirut hostage John McCarthy who campaigned so hard for his release. I interviewed her in the late-1980s. We attended, at different times, the same Doncaster school. Quiet-spoken and reserved, she took no pleasure in celebrity, yet dealt daily with intrusive questions about her relationship — which she knew would garner publicity — with patience and grace.
What even is a relationship if you haven’t seen someone for five years? Does it exist when you may never see the other party again? Or are you just left holding a broken thread? Morrell hadn’t been dating McCarthy long and although they’d discussed buying a flat, there was no ring, no firm promise. Yet she had to play “the girlfriend”, “the woman who waits”. After five years, exhausted by the attention, with no idea if McCarthy was even alive, she asked instead to be known as his “friend”, only to be accused of giving up and “moving on”.
Ratcliffe’s relationship carried the greater social weight of a marriage. He knew his wife’s whereabouts and, when she was not behind bars, they spoke on FaceTime. Yet he sacrificed contact with his daughter for three years so she could stay in Iran and visit her mother, leaving him utterly alone.
Initially both Morrell and Ratcliffe were told by the Foreign Office to keep silent, to let silky diplomats pull invisible strings. In Some Other Rainbow, co-authored with McCarthy, Morrell writes that “supercilious” FO officials made her feel “simple” and were actually proud of the fact they did nothing to secure his release because, unlike the French who paid ransoms, they wouldn’t make deals with terrorists. If she spoke out, they said, kidnappers would think McCarthy had value and up their demands. If journalists asked about the Beirut hostages, the FO briefed that they were dead.
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Ratcliffe lost any illusions that more capable hands were working backstage after Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, erroneously said Nazanin was teaching journalism, grasped by the Iranians as accidental proof she was a spy. This reckless blunder, for which Johnson never apologised, emboldened Ratcliffe to find his own voice.
Yet out alone on a global stage both Radcliffe and Morrell had to deal suddenly with complex questions, meet ministers, confront fears. Morrell describes scary assignations with militia leaders in Damascus, speaking on stage before thousands at a Friends of John McCarthy benefit, trembling as a guest on Wogan.
What keeps the left-behind going through the intrusion, hostility, indifference, the fear your own life is slipping away? Maybe the knowledge that terrible regimes know how to weaponise love too: Iranian interrogators tried to break Nazanin by saying her husband had forsaken her. McCarthy was rewarded by his captors with a newspaper photo of Jill speaking at a benefit. She had not forgotten him!
For McCarthy and Morrell, there was no Mills & Boon ending: they split up after a few years, citing the burden of others’ expectations. The Ratcliffes will have to negotiate that obstacle too. But I was struck at their reunion how Richard held back, didn’t rush his wife, as he must have longed to do, but let her embrace their daughter first.
Whatever happens the fact remains, neither he nor Morrell could have done more. Cynics will speak of diplomatic cogs shifting. But as Konstantin Simonov wrote: “Let those who do not wait say I was lucky/ They will never understand that in the midst of death/ You with your waiting saved me.”