Surrounded by brightly painted pebbles, posters and paintings calling for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, Richard Ratcliffe brought his 21-day hunger strike to an end on Saturday, clinging on to hope his actions have made a difference to his wife’s fate.
He walked away from his makeshift camp outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as he wanted to: not in an ambulance but with his head held high – at the last possible moment there was a chance he could reverse the damage he has inflicted on his body.
Huddled in a fleece in front of his pop-up tent outside the Foreign Office, his cheeks red from the cold, and looking a decade older than his 46 years, Ratcliffe confessed he had spent Friday night racked with pain and dizzy spells. “My feet were really cold, like hurting cold,” he said.
He took this as a “warning sign” that his body was struggling to keep warm and was beginning to make choices about which parts to shut down. He took medical advice and spoke to his wife on Friday night, who, over the phone, begged him to consider stopping.
Photograph: AP
Minutes before he ended the strike early on Saturday afternoon, he said: “My job is to bring Nazanin home, but it’s also to keep a home here, with our daughter Gabriella, for her to come back to. And that is not served by gung-ho stubborn gestures which take things to the bitter end.”
He began his strike fearing that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was about to imminently be returned to a prison in Tehran for another year. Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian aid worker who has already spent five years imprisoned in Iran on spying charges she has always denied, recently lost her appeal against new propaganda charges brought against her by the Iranian regime and is currently living at her parents’ home in Tehran. Each day, she wakes terrified she will be sent back behind bars for crimes she never committed.
“Formally, she’ll get a summons to prison at any point but I think being here has bought us some time – a couple of months maybe,” he told a member of the public who stopped by on Saturday morning to see how he was. She tells him, tearfully: “I’m so proud of you.”
She was not alone. The Observer spent Saturday morning by her husband’s side, and every five minutes he was interrupted by another well-wisher bringing him flowers, a cup of tea, a candle – or simply to express their support.
“I’ve come to shake your hand, mate,” a young man with red hair told him. “I felt the need to come.” An elderly man, who looked as if he was in his early 90s, jumped lithely off his bicycle to tell Ratcliffe if he was a praying man, he would be praying: “Don’t damage yourself.” He added: “Good luck to you.”
It was clear, each time, that these acts of “random kindness” lifted his spirits. “People have been coming from all walks of life, with different interests and different politics, but all united against injustice,” he said.
In his final speech, to a crowd of 40 people who had come to witness the last minutes of his strike, he spoke movingly about the many acts of care and support from members of the public that had kept him going over the past three weeks. “It’s always been important to me that Nazanin knows that. For all the cruelty and all the horrible stuff that has happened, there’s a world of kindness, that has seen our injustice and walks alongside us.”
Seven-year-old daughter Gabriella joined her father for the final moments of his protest, and the relief was visible on his face as he gave her a hug and kiss, knowing his ordeal was about to end.
Throughout the strike, he has been drinking peppermint tea and taking key vitamins and electrolytes with water. His doctor, Lim Jones, hopes that this has made the hunger strike “as safe as it can possibly be” but he will only know what effect it has had on Ratcliffe’s muscles and organs after he is assessed in hospital.
Even then, the danger will not have passed. “Refeeding after a hunger strike is an issue. If you get that wrong, there can be very significant organ damage that happens at a later date. So his food intake will need to be quite carefully monitored and planned,” Jones said.
In the final hours of the strike, Ratcliffe was in good spirits but spoke more slowly than he usually does, as though he was finding it hard to compose his thoughts. Most of the time, he rested in a chair but when he stood up and walked about, his trousers were loose and baggy, hanging off him: “When I go for a shower and I look in the mirror, I can see that I’m a lot scrawnier.”
Just after he said this, he was interrupted by a band of 15 female army cadets – en route to a Remembrance weekend war widows’ march past the nearby Cenotaph – who stopped by to express their solidarity with his cause. In a rather surreal moment, wearing smart brown uniforms, the teenagers stood behind his chair and sang Yellow Submarine, and then a “school song” about fortitude in the face of discouragement. “We just wanted to wish you all the very best,” their commanding officer told Ratcliffe, who looked deeply touched.
Throughout the strike, Gabriella was being cared for at his home in London by relatives. She stopped by regularly to see him and give him “big, big cuddles” – as well as to scold him for growing a scratchy beard.
Over the past few days, she’s been “increasingly” asking him when he was coming home, he said, and that has been preying on his mind.
“She needs me. But it’s also been such a strain on my mum, dad and my sister.”
Fears about his welfare have also been taking its toll on Zaghari-Ratcliffe in Iran, and she has been obsessively checking the weather in London, he said. “Definitely, as the days have gone on, I’ve felt the cold more.”
Although Ratcliffe is hopeful that the protest has postponed his wife’s return to prison, he is bleak about her overall prospects and fears she will not be home for at least a year.
“Loads” of politicians have been to visit him, he said, although far fewer Conservative MPs have come compared with his previous hunger strike outside the Iranian embassy. “Very few Conservatives have come here, with some notable exceptions like Jeremy Hunt and some backbenchers.”Unlike every single member of the public and the many celebrities who have visited him, the Conservatives who have come have not wanted to have their photos taken with Ratcliffe either. “I’m struck by how few Conservatives we have had, given how many constituents have written to their MPs.”
He speculates about whether this is because of a “steer from above” by Boris Johnson. “Why have so few of his party come down to visit when two years ago, many did? That feels like an understanding that the boss wouldn’t be happy, if not explicit orders.”
Johnson himself has not engaged at all with the protest, which Ratcliffe thinks is a “conspicuous dereliction of duty”. “That he’s hidden away, in the circumstances, I find remarkable.” He started taking photos of himself outside 10 Downing Street each day, “to remind him and remind the public that it’s his responsibility to get Nazanin home”.
As he left the camp in a car heading straight for hospital, it was with the heavy knowledge that the breakthrough he was hoping for when he started the strike has not materialised.
But Ratcliffe’s resolve to bring his wife home has never been stronger: “We need to fight another day. And we will.”