FOREIGN Secretary and South West Surrey MP Jeremy Hunt has vowed to “do everything we can” to bring home the wife of a Farnham man jailed in Iran.

Mr Hunt met Richard Ratcliffe and two family members - one of whom, Richard’s uncle Geoffrey, remains a constituent of the MP - for the first time since taking Boris Johnson’s former post at the foreign office on Thursday last week.

Mr Ratcliffe, who grew up in Farnham and regularly returns to his hometown, has been fighting a campaign to free his wife Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe ever since she was sentenced to five years in prison in Iran for spying in 2016 - allegations she denies.

The British-Iranian charity worker was travelling back to the UK with her daughter Gabriella after visiting her parents when she was arrested at Tehran Airport, and the four year old remains separated from her mother and father, cared for by her grandparents in Iran.

Mr Hunt said following the meeting: “Good to meet Richard Ratcliffe and his family yesterday. It’s a shocking and desperate situation and they are showing extraordinary strength and resilience, as is Nazanin. We will do everything we can to bring her home.”

Mr Ratcliffe, supported by his mother Barbara and uncle, asked Mr Hunt to make Nazanin a personal priority, and to discuss her application for diplomatic protection - which if granted would signal that the UK is no longer treating the case as a consular matter but a formal, legal dispute between Britain and Iran.

In a press release, the family said the meeting was “an open one”, adding Mr Hunt “promised to make a decision soon”, and thanked the MP for making time to meet the family so early in office.

Nazanin, who is permitted a weekly phone call with her husband, had also asked that the family present the Foreign Secretary with a painted stone for his office - one of the stones that had been painted in front of the Foreign Office back on Mother’s Day - as a reminder of the promise he inherited from his predecessor Mr Johnson to ‘leave no stone unturned in her case’.

Mr Hunt confirmed that Nazanin is an “absolute priority” for him and the Foreign Office, and noted that his predecessor had a “tremendous personal commitment” to the case, and that he did also.

The new Foreign Secretary, himself a father of three and husband of a dual national, said he understood on a personal level the way the family had conducted their campaign.

On Nazanin’s application for diplomatic protection, Mr Hunt noted that he had reviewed the file, but had not decided yet and wanted “to think about it carefully”. He had the Foreign Office advice, but wanted to gain the family’s perspective, and to discuss the potential risks of raising the political stakes in her case.

These include the risks of inertia (and nothing moving for months), and despair for Nazanin as her spirits get so low.

In Mr Ratcliffe’s view, however, “diplomatic protection helps both” and would also provide an important formal acknowledgement of the wrong suffered by Nazanin.

Nazanin’s husband said: “I said to the Foreign Secretary, for me the greatest risks for Nazanin at this point are inertia and despair. Our situation is pretty clear, as is the limit of Nazanin, and all of us in the end, to endure it.

“My job in the campaign is to avoid both of these risks – to keep challenging both governments to find a solution, to keep showing hope that she is protected.”