IN April 2016, Richard Ratcliffe’s life took a dramatic and unexpected turn. Living in West Hampstead with his wife Nazanin and baby daughter Gabriella, life was good for the former Farnham school boy and City accountant.

All that changed, however, when Nazanin, a charity worker with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, took Gabriella to her native Iran to meet her parents, and on her return to the UK was arrested at Imam Khomeini airport by Iran’s notorious Revolutionary Guard.

Nazanin was subsequently hauled before court on charges of espionage, which she denies, and sentenced to five years in prison - spending her first eight months in solitary confinement.

Gabriella, aged just 22 months at the time, was sent to live with her grandparents, leaving Richard, who is fronting the #FreeNazanin campaign from the UK, separated from his wife and child by more than 3,000 miles ever since.

The family’s tribulations have never been far from the headlines in the subsequent years. But this week a glimmer of hope elevated their case to new heights, as Nazanin was released from Evin prison on the outskirts of Tehran on a temporary three day ‘furlough’.

Speaking to the Herald prior to his wife’s temporary release, Richard, who attended the former St George’s School in Castle Street and played scrum half for Farnham Rugby Club, explained how the situation in Iran has affected his wife and daughter, and how vital the outpouring of support has been to his family.

“Nazanin had an overwhelming reaction to what she went through when she came out of solitary confinement, and although she’s better now there are long term consequences of having been kept in isolation for so long. Emotionally she gets very angry and bleak, and the thing I always worry about is her mental health.

“But the fact that people care, that people follow her story, is profoundly important to me and for the family to keep us going. Our story is kind of crazy and there is a part of me that thinks ‘am I going mad?’. So having that outside audience is anchoring.

“It’s really important that alongside what is a fairly arbitrary experience of cruelty, you’ve got all that big experience of human kindness as well.”

Richard added, due to his wife’s jail term, Gabriella has now spent much of her formative years in Iran.

He continued: “Gabriella has grown up away from us, and that is what I think Nazanin resents the most. She doesn’t really speak English now, only Farsi, and has grown up and has adapted to living in Iran. She understands things like ‘I love you’ and ‘I missed you’. But in terms of asking questions, it’s quite hard work.”

Richard added several false dawns have hit his family hard, recalling one particularly cruel episode when Nazanin was promised a furlough for Gabriella’s fourth birthday in June, only to have this snatched away at the last moment.

“Nazanin had huge high hopes in the run-up to Gabriella’s birthday, and then it just didn’t happen,” Richard continued.

“She was really low after that and everyone promised Gabriella her mum would be there for her birthday and then she wasn’t, so now there’s a way in which her parents let her down too.”

Richard added he has had an “up and down relationship” with the British government, recalling in particular the misguided comment by the then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson in November last year that Nazanin had been “training journalists” in Iran.

However, Richard has welcomed Mr Johnson’s replacement, Jeremy Hunt - not least because, as the constituency MP for much of Richard’s family, he is already familiar with their case - and praised him for his approach to the issue.

It has also conspired that Nazanin was among a wave of Iranian dual nationals arrested between February and August 2016 shortly after economic sanctions on Iran were lifted and its government swapped prisoners with the US as part of a landmark nuclear deal, and Richard now believes that his family are being used as a bargaining chip in negotiations between the British and Iranian governments.

Discussing his own role in the campaign, he added: “There is a frustration that this isn’t our fight, the Government needs to sort it, and that’s inherent in the situation, so while the government has always made nice noises, she is still in prison.

“My job is to make this ‘not normal’, to stress this is not a normal situation and not let it settle as one.”

For more information about Richard’s campaign to free his wife, visit the website freenazanin.com.