I’m exhausted, but unless the UK pays its debt to Iran my wife won’t be allowed to come home
This may not be the finest article ever published by the Guardian, or the best that I have written. After 17 days on hunger strike outside the Foreign Office, I have to admit I am slowing down both in my speech and in my thinking. Until the weekend, I was on a long plateau, but each day now feels like a descent. I am very tired. It’s probably the body saying, “be careful: do not take this too far”. It is not that I am hungry, although I have a strange desire for scrambled egg on toast, a food I do not especially like. The black coffee that I drank last week is now impossible. It makes me too sick. A couple of veterans have told me to take water with salt.
People ask whether this self-inflicted punishment is worthwhile. But I felt I had no choice: it seemed the moral thing to do. I felt that if I did not act, it was likely that within weeks my wife, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been furloughed from jail in Tehran, would be sent back for a second sentence. By acting, I hoped to forestall this.
