Who was to blame for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe being held captive in Iran? It shouldn’t take a professor of ethics to answer such a question. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe was being held on trumped-up charges by a despotic regime that has used hostage-taking to advance its agenda ever since its formation in the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Back then it was said to be ‘students’ who spontaneously over-ran the US embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 hostages, holding them for more than a year while the new theocratic government ruthlessly exploited the situation to humiliate the US administration of Jimmy Carter. In the case of Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, at least no pretence was made that anyone other than the government of Iran was behind her detention since spring 2016.
And yet according to Labour leader Keir Starmer, it was Boris Johnson’s big mouth that was to blame for her not being back in leafy Hampstead with her husband and daughter many moons earlier.
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