By Emily Retter

Mirror

Each morning amid the frenetic clamour before school, Gabriella and her mum Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe perform the same ritual.

Over video call, Nazanin, 3,000 miles away in Tehran, watches Gabriella, neat in her uniform, brush her long hair.

It is something she used to do when Gabriella visited her in prison, finding that most intimate act of maternal love calming. Now it soothes them both.

Shaking it out behind her, Gabriella insists softly: “I want Mummy to curl my hair. No one else can curl my hair.”

And she nods resolutely it won’t be getting cut until Mummy returns home.

“Nazanin wants to be here for the first proper haircut,” explains dad Richard, stroking the long strands. “She wants to take her to the hairdresser.”

Gabriella is now seven, and in a couple of weeks will have been living with Richard in their North London flat for two years.

“Can we celebrate, can I stay up until midnight?” she negotiates quick as a flash, with a grin.

While the clear bond the pair have forged is one to ­celebrate, sadly there is little else.

It has also been two years since Gabriella saw her mum in person. Two years since they cuddled; two years since Nazanin brushed her hair.

The little girl was five when she was hastily granted permission to fly home to the UK from Iran with Nazanin’s brother, where she had been living with her grandparents since her mum’s shock arrest in April 2016.

Then a toddler, she and British-Iranian Nazanin, 43, had spent a short holiday in Tehran, and were about to board a flight home when Nazanin was held and imprisoned on spying charges.

Two years ago, still in jail serving a five-year term, Nazanin painfully agreed Gabriella should return home to begin school, crying over her lost prison visits, but never believing they would be ­separated for so long.

When the pandemic hit Nazanin was released to her parents’ home on house arrest, and in spring this year hoped she would be reunited with her little girl.

Instead, she was handed a new one-year term for propaganda, and remains stuck at her parents’ home, this week spending her 2,000th day in captivity.

She is an ­innocent hostage, says Richard, acknowledged as a pawn in a dispute between Iran and Britain over a £400million arms debt the UK owes for non-delivery of Chieftain tanks in 1979.

This has been complicated by broken global negotiations over a nuclear deal with Iran, as a result of which Iran still faces economic sanctions.

But at the centre of the politics, after three prime ministers, five foreign secretaries – the latest, Liz Truss, this week met her Iranian counterpart in New York, insisting she is “absolutely determined” to secure Nazanin’s release – sits a family splintered, and a seven-year-old girl handling overwhelming emotions.

Heartbreakingly, she tells me: “I don’t like to talk about feelings.”

She shows me a furry worry monster with a zipped mouth in which she can place her fears, but won’t reveal any. It is tossed to one side. She is a bright, ­articulate girl, “second for spelling in my class” despite arriving in England with little English.

But life is far from certain.

“I still lie on the floor of her bedroom until she goes to sleep,” Richard confides.

“Yesterday she was tearfully saying, ‘I want Mummy back’ at bedtime. She has said a few times, ‘I want to go back to Iran, I don’t like it here’.”