My girl is home for Christmas. Now, we just need to get Nazanin back
Richard Ratcliffe on the joy of being reunited with his daughter – and the pain of her mother’s absence
“ARE these pink presents for Daddy?” asks Richard Ratcliffe, pointing to a pile of wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree. “Or are they for Gabriella?” His five-year-old daughter looks up at him indignantly, crying out, “They’re mine Daddy!” until Richard’s face breaks into a smile, and she squeezes his legs in a hug.
This is the first Christmas that Richard, 44, is spending with his daughter since she was two years old. For the last three and a half years, she has been living with her grandparents in Iran, while her mother Nazanin, 40, has been locked up in jail.
The family’s nightmare began in April 2016, when Nazanin, a dual British and Iranian citizen who worked as a project manager in the UK for the charity Thomson Reuters Foundation, was arrested in Tehran after taking her daughter on holiday to visit her family.
After enduring bouts of solitary confinement and intense interrogation, she was sentenced to five years in jail by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on espionage charges that her family insist are “utter lies”. While Nazanin has spent the past 44 months imprisoned, Gabriella was living with her grandparents nearby so that she could visit her mother weekly.
But when she turned five this year, her parents made the heartbreaking decision to allow her to leave Iran and her mother so she could go home to London to be reunited with her father.
“Nazanin and I always had a deal that she’d stay there until she turned school age,” says Richard. He is emotional as he relives their reunion on Oct 10, just before midnight at Heathrow airport. “Cuddles,” he says simply. “She ran to cuddle me. And squeezed hard. I did too. We just cuddled.”
While Richard has spent the past two months rebuilding his relationship with the daughter he has seen only via Skype since March 2016, Nazanin is being forced to adjust to no longer seeing Gabriella weekly. Instead, their relationship has been reduced to three short phone calls a week.
“Five-and-a-half-year-olds aren’t great on the phone,” sighs Richard. “It’s been really, really tough for Nazanin. She was really traumatised she’d missed her daughter’s first day at school and then couldn’t get her daughter to tell her about how it was on the phone, because Gabriella wasn’t in the mood to talk much.”
Back when they were a normal young family, they would spend Christmas at Richard’s parents’ home in Hampshire, surrounded by the typical noise and festivities of a large family. For the past three years, Richard has “tried not to acknowledge Christmas
– it was too hard to face up to it”, but now he is desperate to finally give his daughter the Christmas she deserves. “We’re going to the local church for an evening service on Christmas Eve,” he says. “I wasn’t a big churchgoer before, but they’ve been so supportive, and that sense of belonging and community is important for Gabriella. “Then we’re going to wake up here at our family home, because I didn’t want it to be overwhelming for her with all her cousins at my parents’, and then we’ll go down to Hampshire for a late lunch with everyone. They’re so excited; having Gabriella home has really lifted everyone’s spirits.”
The flat, strewn with dolls, enormous pink castles and strings of fairy lights, looks completely different to how it did before his daughter returned home. “I’ve spent three and a half years being a campaigning husband, campaigning dad, and the flat was a kind of a divorced dad’s flat,” he explains.
But while Richard is now preparing for a festive Christmas with his daughter, Nazanin is embarking on a dry hunger strike that will last from Christmas Eve until Christmas Day, and will then be repeated on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
It is in support of Dr Kylie Mooregilbert, an Australian-british academic who is also in Evin prison with Nazanin and has spent 15 months in solitary confinement after being arrested on espionage charges.
“Nazanin and some other prisoners are joining her while she does an open-ended dry hunger strike,” says Richard. “What they’re doing to Kylie is criminal, and an abuse.” He respects Nazanin’s decision to support her, but is naturally concerned for his wife’s health. “It just casts a different shadow of what was promising to be a nice Christmas.”
While Gabriella happily runs around the house, showing off her toys, and cuddling up to her dad, Richard admits that it has not all been easy. Gabriella speaks Farsi better than English, and is dealing with the trauma of not being able to see her mother, or her Iranian grandmother.
“It’s an abandonment for her,” says Richard. “She came here with the idea of Daddy, someone she’d seen on the phone, looking after her. But the reality of Daddy taking her to the toilet or running a bath, or doing anything other than playing games with her on Skype, was tough. Initially she was quite daunted. And I was quite daunted, too.”
Gabriella’s uncle Mohammed brought her over to London and is staying with her and Richard to help with the transition. “He provides continuity,” says Richard. “And it was really helpful at the start because she didn’t want to be alone without anyone who didn’t speak Farsi. But her English is really improving now, and Daddy’s allowed to fall asleep with her … It’s all a journey, and there’s a kind of step-dad element to it where I have to earn the right to be a parent again.”
The hardest part for him has been the moments where Gabriella is upset, and misses her mother and grandmother. “She takes a teddy from her granny, and a teddy from her mummy, and clutches one in each hand, and cries herself to sleep.” He sighs. “It’s horrible because there’s nothing I can do except say ‘I love you’ and hold her, while she’s just crying.”
While his biggest focus now is helping Gabriella feel safe and secure in London, he has not stopped campaigning tirelessly for Nazanin’s release. Just before the general election he wrote a letter to Boris Johnson, accusing the Prime Minister of making “placebo promises” in regard to Nazanin when he was foreign secretary.
“He said he would ‘leave no stone unturned,’” says Richard angrily. “We haven’t forgotten that, and Iran won’t have, either.”
The Prime Minister made those promises in 2017, after he was publicly criticised for a gaffe when he told MPS Nazanin was teaching journalism in Iran, when in fact she was there on holiday. “His words there didn’t do much damage, but his promise afterwards really did. Iran will be expecting him to honour that, or engage in a different way.” He believes it was why Nazanin’s most recent appeal and request for parole was turned down. “It’s a game of chess, and we’re the chess pieces caught in the middle of it.”
But for all of the pain of his wife’s imprisonment, Richard’s joy at being reunited with his daughter for Christmas is evident. “This is my first real Christmas in a long time,” he says. “And hopefully it’s interim Christmas, the last one without Nazanin, so that by next Christmas, we’ll all be together.”
‘She takes a teddy from her granny, and a teddy from her mummy, and clutches one in each hand, and cries herself to sleep’