This is the Guardian.

Hello, my name is Patrick Winter. I'm the diplomatic editor at the Guardian.

And I'm just talking about a long-read piece, I wrote a little while back about Nazinean Zagari Ratcliffe,

who has now been released from Iran and in fact attended her press conference

to see her very happy and very composed and very thoughtful.

The piece I wrote, I guess to extent it had any kind of value, anyone plow through it,

it was really trying to raise this issue of the fact that the UK owed a very large debt to Iran.

And this arose from the breakdown of an arms contract at the time of the Shah of Iran.

So we're in essence, we'd promise to give the Iranian Shah government a large number of

chieftain tanks and the Iranians handed over the money and then when there was a change in

government in Iran we didn't give them the tanks but we kept their money.

And what the piece tried to document was how there'd been a really, really long court battle

in international courts and in the UK courts about the fact that the UK owed this money.

I think what it helped to do as a piece was to link the way in which this non-payment of the debt

in the Iranians eyes had damaged the relationship with the UK and was in a sense behind the arrest

of Nazinean Zagari Ratcliffe. I know the Iranian say she's a spy but I think in reality whatever they

may have in their own mind they knew that what they were using her as a bargaining chip to get this

money back. And I guess the argument of the piece is that there is a lot of moral hazard and

dubious ethics around paying rancums but this was not a rancum, this was a debt, a legitimate debt

that the UK owed and it seems to have just taken such a long time for the UK government to come

to this point of view and even now I think there's debate about why the debt wasn't paid.

I mean it's slightly reflected in the piece but the ministers involved. Many of them in the foreign

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