Row over British academic’s case highlights complexities of Middle East diplomacy
In Iran last week the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, gave his opposite number, Javad Zarif, a copy of Nelson Mandela’s The Long March to Freedom to give to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the Iranian-British dual national who is in jail in Tehran. It was a tactic he picked up from Margaret Thatcher, who gave books on liberty to Russian leaders such as Andrei Gromyko to hand to Andrei Sakharov, the Russian dissident for whose freedom she had been campaigning.
By the middle of last week, Hunt was starting to think he might have to find a similar volume to give to the rulers of the United Arab Emirates to pass on to Matthew Hedges, after the UAE unexpectedly imposed a life sentence on the British academic. The Foreign Office was genuinely shocked by the severity of the sentence, and thought it ran counter to the personal assurances Hunt thought he had received from the UAE leadership.
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