Boris Johnson should resign if British woman's jail term in Iran gets extended - Guardian

Boris Johnson should resign if British woman's jail term in Iran gets extended, says Labour MP - Politics live

Rolling coverage of the day’s political developments as they happen

Andrew Sparrow

Monday 13 November 2017

This is what Boris Johnson had to say about the Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe case when he arrived at the meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels this morning. He said:

Let me just say on Iran and on Iraq and consular cases generally, they are all very sensitive. And I think the key thing to understand is that we are working very, very hard and intensively and impartially on all of those cases.

Boris Johnson (left) and Greece’s foreign minister Nikos Kotzias at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels this morning.

Boris Johnson (left) and Greece’s foreign minister Nikos Kotzias at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels this morning. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

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MPs return to the Commons today after their mini recess to find that, just as on the day they left, Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, is in trouble. As well as facing criticism for some of his colleagues for apparently setting up a secret Vote Leave cabal with Michael Gove and dictating orders to Theresa May (well, sort of), he can’t get away from the trouble caused by his error about Nazanin Zahhari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian woman detained in Iran.

This morning the Labour MP Tulip Siddiq, Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s local MP, said that if Zaghari-Ratcliffe spends “even one more day” in jail because of Johnson telling the foreign affairs committee that she was in Iran teaching people journalism, he should resign. (Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s family and employers say she was in Iran on a family holiday. Johnson subsequently told MPs he accepts that, but he has refused to admit that his original comment was wrong, instead insisting that it was misinterpreted.)

Siddiq told BBC Breakfast:

This issue isn’t political point-scoring for me; this about getting an innocent mother home. I’ve been campaigning on this for 18 months - if Boris Johnson is going to Iran then I have a few demands.

The first is that he needs to take my constituent, Richard Ratcliffe, with him.

When he gets to Iran, I want him to meet Nazanin face to face. There’s a history of British diplomats going to Iran, visiting the very prison that Nazanin is in and not getting to meet her

If the foreign secretary goes to Iran, meets Nazanin, takes Richard and officially retracts the statement he’s made then at least he’s trying to make amends for what he said.

But she added:

If my constituent spends even one more day in prison as a result of what the foreign secretary said then he should resign.

Richard Ratclifffe, Nazanin’s husband, has also been giving interviews this morning. He told the Today programme:

I don’t think it’s helpful for Nazanin at this point. I don’t think it’s helpful also in terms of who that looks in Iran for me to be looking like I’m playing politics. It is very important that the Iranians can see that this is just a family who are battling to bring Nazanin home, and not get this sense that we’re some sort of great Machiavellian power. We’re not.

I will post more from Ratcliffe’s interviews shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

11am: Downing Street lobby briefing.

1pm: The inquest opens into the death of Carl Sargeant, the Welsh government minister who apparently killed himself after being forced to stand aside on the basis of harassment allegations.

2.30pm: David Gauke, the work and pensions secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

At some point today Theresa May is meeting a delegation of European business leaders to discuss Brexit and the transition.

As usual, I will be covering breaking political news as it happens, as well as bringing you the best reaction, comment and analysis from the web. I plan to post a summary at lunchtime and another in the afternoon.

You can read all today’s Guardian politics stories here.

Here is the Politico Europe round-up of this morning’s political news from Jack Blanchard’s Playbook. And here is the PoliticsHome list of today’ top 10 must reads.