Don’t forget – Boris Johnson’s carelessness put Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s life at risk

If Nazanin’s release shows the best Johnson can do, it also reminds us of the worst

About the best that can be said for Johnson is that his carelessness might have made him more determined to make amends (Free Nazanin campaign/AFP via Ge)

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is free. A cause for celebration, though we should also like to know more about the fate of the other dual national, Anoosheh Ashoori, whose case hasn’t had quite the same high profile.

It’s time to recognise that Boris Johnson is useful for something. He likes to think of himself as someone who can get things done – despite the plentiful evidence to the contrary – and who refuses to be constrained by laws and conventions. As we know, that contempt for the rules can also lead to trouble, but an impatience with bureaucratic excuses and diplomatic obfuscation may well have helped end the hell that Nazanin and Anoosheh have endured.

You can see Johnson’s logic. If the UK owes Iran about £400m for undelivered tanks, and it is a “legitimate debt” as Liz Truss calls it, then why not pay it back? The sanctions say otherwise, and the Americans might not like it, but it is, when all is said and done, Iran’s money, and hanging on to it for four decades hasn’t done anyone much good. Who cares if the Iranians think it is ransom money? We did actually owe it.

I wonder, by the way, whatever happened to those Chieftain tanks the late Shah ordered for delivery in 1979? Museum pieces, I suppose, but they might still come in handy in Ukraine.

So Johnson deserves thanks and praise – up to a point. If Nazanin’s release shows the best Johnson can do, it also reminds us of the worst. We cannot ever forget that he may well have prolonged and worsened the agonies of Nazanin and her family, by handing the Iranians a propaganda coup and justification for her conviction for spying and subversion when he was foreign secretary.

Appearing before a select committee in November 2017, his notorious, shameful statement went as follows: “Obviously, we will have to be very careful about this, because we want them to be released. I have raised this case many times now with Javad Zarif, my Iranian counterpart.

“When we look at what Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was doing, she was simply teaching people journalism, as I understand it, at the very limit. I hope that a way forward can be found. I must say, I find it deeply depressing; I think it is totally contrary to the interests of the Iranian people for this to continue.”

She wasn’t actually teaching journalism, of course, “at the very limit” or not. It was a gaffe, yes – but it was also much more than that. It wasn’t like when Nadine Dorries thought Channel 4 gets taxpayer money or when Dominic Raab didn’t know Dover was a busy port. Johnson’s remarks ended up with someone being mentally tortured.

Johnson put someone’s life at risk because he couldn’t be bothered to read or remember his brief, and a few days later, Nazanin was dragged into an Iranian courtroom, though in the end, the Iranians refrained from levelling further charges. But it certainly didn’t make her release any easier or her treatment kinder.

In that same session, and much less noticed, Johnson actually played down the public campaign by her husband Richard and soft pedalled her plight, presumably as part of some wider geopolitical game that might eventually help get her out of jail, as a bonus.

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The impression Johnson gave was that she, and the others, didn’t matter much, frankly: “If I may say so – to get back to the point that the Chairman rightly made about the Iranian state – one of the disadvantages of escalating these difficult consular cases and having a very loud public campaign in this country is that that simply strengthens the hand of those who are using these cases for their own internal ends in Iran.

“That is why sometimes the advice I have had over the months has been that no matter how frustrating and miserable it is, and clearly these cases are very sad, the best approach is a diplomatic one.”

So best just let them rot, in other words. Fortunately, Johnson wasn’t allowed to do that, either as foreign minister or as prime minister. There’s no doubt that the efforts of the Nazanin’s family, of MPs such as Tulip Siddiq and Jeremy Hunt, and of the media pushed the foreign office into making the cases of the dual nationals a priority in a way – according to Johnson’s own account in 2017 – they would not have otherwise done.

About the best that can be said for Johnson is that his carelessness might have made him more determined to make amends, and repair the damage to his reputation, by proving his critics wrong and getting her out. Even so, we know the Ukraine war might have pushed Johnson into making concessions on the Iran nuclear deal and oil. It really took £400m, rather than Johnson’s negotiating skills, to free Nazanin. Not his money either, of course.