A wise move to allow Nazanin space and time to tell her story
There are plenty of tough interviewers and Emma Barnett is among the toughest. But she also has an uncommon gift for empathy which was very much on display in Tuesday’s Woman’s Hour Special interview with Nazanin Zaghari-ratcliffe on Radio 4.
This was a big story, Zaghariratcliffe’s first interview since her release from captivity in Iran in March. So much so, the BBC couldn’t wait to get it on air and bounced out a half-hour televised version on Monday night. But, at twice the length, the Woman’s Hour interview was the one that gave Zaghari-ratcliffe the opportunity to do what she wanted most – tell her story, in her own words.
Clearly, this was what Barnett wanted, too, and she intervened only minimally to the give the interview structure. Her reward was a number of significant scoops, among them the fact that Boris Johnson admitted in private to Zaghari-ratcliffe that her release was linked to the payment of a historic £400million debt owed by the British government to Iran. Even bigger (and audible in Barnett’s startled response) was the fact that Zaghari-ratcliffe was forced – in the presence of a British official – to sign a false confession at the airport before she was allowed to board the plane home. A galling humiliation for a woman who had spent more than six years, in appalling circumstances, proclaiming her innocence.
Aside from such headlines, it was the emotional and psychological impact on Zaghari-ratcliffe that came across most strongly in the extended interview. The horror and pain of being separated from her 22-monthold daughter; of being thrown into solitary confinement for months on end; of finding solidarity with others in a situation that was completely beyond their control. Also, the bittersweet joy of being released while leaving others behind, still held hostage by the Iranians, and her understandable struggle, two months after her release, to readjust to family life and, still, to entirely believe that she is free.
In the end it was Zaghari-ratcliffe’s extraordinary resilience and humanity that sang out from this interview, her intensely expressed gratitude to everyone who campaigned on her behalf was a miracle of emotion in itself. Barnett’s admirably light touch was key to allowing her the space to put so much of her story across.
The BBC announced last week that record numbers are using its online BBC Sounds platform, with upwards of four million listeners a week now accessing it for podcasts, music mixes and on-demand. (That’s compared with 33.11million listening to its live radio output.) I use it a lot and was glad of it, having been away, to catch up with Red Lines, a peculiar Radio 4 drama about David Cameron’s botched efforts to bring the Syrian regime to book for using chemical weapons on its own people in 2013.
On paper it sounded tantalising, with Toby Stephens playing Cameron and master impressionist Jon Culshaw as Ed Miliband, William Hague and George Osborne. Even more intriguingly, Red Lines was co-written by historian Sir Anthony Seldon (a biographer of Cameron) and Sir Craig Oliver (who was Cameron’s communications director in No 10). But any hopes that this true-blue insider pairing might be the new Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn (of Yes Minister fame) were quickly dashed.
Because while it rollicked along entertainingly enough, it was never remotely clear what they were hoping to achieve with it. What began as a soggy satire about a prime minister’s holiday being interrupted by his conscience (Samantha Cameron reduced to a whining “but you said you’d make time for the children” cardboard cut-out) ended in a clunking exercise in political excuse-making.
Even more bizarre was how its attempt to portray Cameron as a man of principle, brought low by the wheedling trade of politics and the perfidious opportunism of Labour’s Ed Miliband, had the opposite effect of showing him up as a weakling unable to persuade even his own Cabinet to follow him, and a pawn who couldn’t see how he was being pushed around the global chessboard by Vladimir Putin. Deliberately or not, William Hague (brilliantly rendered by Culshaw) was the only character who appeared to have any inkling of what statesmanship involved.
Even the drama’s “bigger” claim that the failure to make a meaningful response to such a clear breach of red lines laid down by the West emboldened Putin to invade Crimea six months later, and thus resulted in his invasion of Ukraine, seemed an over-simplification, to say the least.
The insider’s view doesn’t always, it seems, offer the clearest perspective.