When Lord Ahmed and Baroness Warsi first met Gillian Gibbons she was sleeping on a camp bed shoved in the corner of an office used by Sudan’s secret police.

The two Muslim peers who secured the teacher’s release told The Times yesterday on the flight home about the diplomatic tightrope they walked during negotiations with the Sudanese Government.

Ms Gibbons had been arrested for allowing her seven-year-old pupils to name a teddy bear Mohamed and the two peers had flown to the capital, Khartoum, last week expecting that she would be released quickly.

Lord Ahmed said that they realised the political complexity of the issue when opposing moderate and extremist factions disclosed that they would be forced to resign from the Sudanese Government if the talks went wrong. “The Government was split and we had to work with both sides, and both sides were saying they would have to pull out,” he said yesterday.

Ms Gibbons, 54, and the two peers were welcomed warmly after they touched down at Heathrow. “I never imagined this would happen,” she said after being reunited with her children, John, 25, and Jessica, 27. “I am just an ordinary middle-aged primary school teacher.”

Although she was delighted to be home, she said that she was sad to have left Sudan, adding that she harboured no bitterness towards the country or its people. “I went out there to have a bit of an adventure and got more of an adventure than I bargained for,” she said.

Gordon Brown also spoke to the teacher on her arrival home and by last night she was back in Merseyside with her family.

The mission to secure Ms Gibbons’s release began on Thursday with a phone call from Sudan to Lord Ahmed, hours after Ms Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days’ detention. The Labour peer had been in talks with the Sudanese since Ms Gibbon’s arrest and he was told that the President Bashir would be ready to offer a pardon if he flew out to Khartoum.

However, the Sudanese said that they would prefer to hand Ms Gibbons over to a woman. “It was like we were on a promise as long as I took a female parliamentarian,” Lord Ahmed said.

He invited Lady Warsi, a member of the Shadow Cabinet, on the mission and they flew out on Friday night, confident that a meeting with the President and a pardon could be secured by Saturday.

About 1,000 protesters who congregated outside the President’s official residence on Friday demanding Ms Gibbon’s death changed the nature of the negotiations.

Waving ceremonial swords and fired up by radical imams, they burned newspaper pictures of Ms Gibbons and chanted “Shame, shame on the UK” before marching on the British Embassy. Lord Ahmed said: “When we arrived on Saturday this Friday prayer demonstration had changed everything.”

Mr Bashir, whose power is overshadowed by hardliners in the Ministry of the Interior, was under pressure from Islamists. The peers were told that a retrial was needed so a more severe sentence could be imposed.

They said that they made a virtue of their independence from the Foreign Office “It was a different kind of diplomacy,” Lady Warsi said. “It was about using everything we have in Britain – the fact we are parliamentarians, Muslims. We also have an acute sensitivity and understanding of Islam and the culture.”

As well as talking Muslim to Muslim, rather than West to East or Britain to Sudan, Lady Warsi said that she tried to win over the real power centre in Khartoum. “I was told that the Sudanese women hold a lot of authority in their own homes and browbeat their husbands. So when I was introduced to the wife of a senior official I made sure I convinced her – woman to woman – of how important it was to release to Gillian.”

Neither peer wanted to discuss exactly what broke the deadlock for fear of undermining their progress.

By Sunday evening they had cancelled their flight home the next morning. Instead they were sipping small glasses of sweet, black tea at the Republican Palace with Ms Bashir. And Ms Gibbons was almost on her way home.

The transcript

Q Now that you’re back home, what’s your thoughts and feelings about what you were accused of?
A I don’t really think I know enough about it to comment on it really. It’s a very difficult area and it’s a very delicate area.

Q You went out there to do good, and to work with children and the school. When it was put to you what you were accused of having done, what went through your mind at the time?
A Well, I was very upset to think I might have caused offence to people – very, very upset about it.

Q Did you ever think it could lead to the ordeal that followed over the next few days?
A Could anyone ever imagine that this could happen? I’m just an ordinary middle-aged primary school teacher. I went out there to have a bit of an adventure and got a bit more adventure than I bargained for. I don’t think anyone could have imagined that it would have snowballed like this [receives hug from son]. He’s not usually this affectionate, you know.

Q When did you realise this international storm that was brewing?
A Well, on my second day in prison somebody told me they had seen me in a paper in Sudan, and then I had a meeting with the British consul, who told me that. They said we need to phone your next of kin, and I said, well, don’t worry about it, they’ll only worry. Then they told me that it was in the British press and then . . . I mean, I’d missed most of it, the thing about being in prison is you’re so isolated, you don’t really hear what’s going on, you just hear snatches and they didn’t allow me many visitors at first, because they didn’t want to prejudice the trial, so once the trial was over I got a lot of visitors then. So it’s all come as a huge shock to me.

Q You said you were well treated but the fact is it’s still prison. It must have been terrifying.
A Yes, it was, yeah. That’s an understatement.

Q What was it actually like in the prison?
A Well I was in two different prisons. I never actually went to Omdurman Women’s Prison, thankfully. The first prison I was at was just like downtown prison, sort of like a lockup. I was treated the same as any other Sudanese prisoner in that you’re just given the bare minimum, no comforts really. And then I was moved to another prison, and then the Ministry of the Interior sent me a bed, which is probably the best present I’ve ever had.

Q What are your plans for the future now – are you still going to carry on teaching?
A Yes. Well, I’m looking for a job, because I’m jobless. So my immediate plan is to spend Christmas with my family, and then very seriously look for employment.

Q Will that be abroad?
A I don’t know yet. I’ll have to discuss that with my family.

Q So have you got any plans for a big celebration back in Liverpool?
A [To son] Are we? Have we got a party planned? No, take that as a no. Thank you.

Times Recommends

• 'Radio Rancid' is scourge of Obama
• French gulp as global warming alters wines
• Colton, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs