Incompetent Boris Johnson should hang his head in shame as ignorance, mistakes and callousness by senior Conservatives condemned Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to six years of hell.
She would almost certainly have been released long ago had ministers repaid a £400million debt for tanks earlier instead of blundering, stonewalling and playing political games at the cost of people’s lives.
Hard lessons must be learned and the truth must be published which is why former Tory Foreign Officer Minister Alistair Burt’s call for a Parliamentary inquiry deserves to be heeded in the national interest.
It should never have taken the reigns of three Premiers and five Foreign Secretaries over six years to get Nazanin released.
The authoritarian, brutal regime in Tehran should never have held her hostage but equally, the refusal to refund money for tanks that were never delivered was unacceptable.
Sickening end
Putin's invaders killing a survivor of four Second World War concentration camps in Ukraine is truly disgusting.
The murder of Boris Romanchenko, 96, who lived through imprisonment at Buchenwald, Peenemunde, Dora and Bergen-Belsen, in his shelled Kharkiv flat is another terrible Russian crime against humanity.
Romanchenko was vice-president of the Buchenwald-Dora International Committee and worked to keep alive the memory of those lost to the Nazis’ genocide.
Invented propaganda that Ukraine is somehow run by Neo-Nazis is a figment of Putin’s deranged, fevered mind. What is terrifyingly real, however, are the growing similarities between his and Hitler’s onslaughts.
Dry society
Season two of Bridgerton has arrived – but it is not as raunchy as the first.
Is this a bonkers decision? Bosses at Netflix will be hoping that the lack of nookie does not turn off the Regency show’s legion of fans.