Richard Ratcliffe and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe deserve better than this government

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Richard Ratcliffe holds a picture of his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on the 19th day of his hunger strike (PA)

On Friday, I met Richard Ratcliffe outside the Foreign Office, where he was mounting a hunger strike. A humble and sincere man, he accepted my donation of hand warmers with gratitude.

But why is Richard Ratcliffe outside Whitehall? And why is his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe still detained in Iran?

Could it have anything to do with the UK government? Could it have anything to do with Boris Johnson not reading or understanding his brief as foreign secretary? We should have seen the writing on the wall then about the way Johnson conducts business.

How about the £400m the UK owes Iran. Is it any wonder they are holding political pawns?

A family is being pulled apart. Why can’t the UK government and Liz Truss do more to help? How many petitions to the government are required before they repay the £400m and Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returns home?

Gordon Ronald

Hertfordshire

Maskless, U-turning Johnson

What a week. Boris Johnson appears meeting nurses, touching elbows but with no mask on. He must believe he’s above all the guidance. The guidance in that hospital is that masks must be worn at all times but hey, he doesn’t give a toss about putting people at risk.

And they wonder why we don’t like or respect them? Richard Ratcliffe is on hunger strike because of him and his complete lack of control over what comes out of his mouth, and now look what it has escalated to.

So many U-turns, proof that he changes his mind in light of the opinion of others, because he’s desperate for external validation. Last week, he tried to get a "chummy" off the hook, there was a big backlash, and now he’s saying MPs should not have other jobs.

He is a dangerous person to be in a position of such responsibility.

Dr R Kimble

Leeds

A break for Boris?

Now that Cop26 is all but over, shouldn’t our prime minister take the opportunity to go away on a well-deserved holiday, before he has to start straining every sinew in his endeavours to organise a Christmas break?

Robert Boston

Kent

The end of apartheid

Paul Martin concludes his very charitable account of De Klerk’s role in the ending of apartheid by saying that his contribution to that seismic process showed that “the leopard can change its spots”.

That would be an incontrovertible comment on De Klerk’s posthumous apology for apartheid.  But some of us who were there at the time were sure that De Klerk, while recognising that in the longer term the writing was on the wall for apartheid, was only unbanning the African National Congress (ANC) because he remained convinced that white people were by definition more intelligent and politically astute than their black counterparts, and would run rings around them when it came to the forging of South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution.

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If De Klerk imagined he would be able to shape a post-apartheid dispensation that would enable his fellow Afrikaners to retain effective control of the country, fronted by a handful of black puppets, he could not have been more out of touch with reality.

The constitutional negotiations saw him up against a group of very highly qualified and competent black leaders who succeeded in shaping what is arguably the most enlightened national constitution to be found anywhere in the world, and ensured that control over the governance of South Africa did not remain with the Afrikaner nationalists.

D Maughan Brown

York