Calls for Dominic Raab’s resignation have intensified after it emerged that neither he nor his junior ministers spoke to their Afghan counterparts as the Taliban closed in on Kabul.
Senior British officials had advised the foreign secretary to call Hanif Atmar, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, on Friday 13 August. They believed that he could arrange the safe evacuation of interpreters who had worked alongside British troops.
But Raab “failed to make the call”, the Daily Mail reported, instead delegating the task to junior minister Lord Goldsmith. Atmar then refused to speak with someone below his rank.
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“It was thought the telephone conversation had then taken place the next day,” the Mail continued, but in an “explosive development” it emerged today that it never took place. A Foreign Office spokesperson admitted that “given the rapidly changing situation it was not possible to arrange a call before the Afghan government collapsed”.
The Taliban completed its takeover of Kabul on Sunday, prompting Raab to return from his holiday in Crete.
The news adds further pressure to the foreign secretary who was accused of being ‘missing in action’ as the Taliban took control of Kabul last weekend.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said a phone call would not have made “a blind bit of difference” to the outcome, and Raab has said yesterday he will not resign. But the events of the past week have left him “fighting for his political career”, The Telegraph reported.
Labour leader Keir Starmer had already accused Raab of staying “on holiday as Kabul was falling”, telling the Commons: “You cannot coordinate an international response from the beach.”
In retrospect, Raab said, he would not have gone on holiday if he had known the Taliban would take Kabul. “No one saw this coming,” he said. No one, says i editor-in-chief Oliver Duff, “apart from all Afghans, some other countries which sped up the evacuation of local Afghan colleagues, and the world’s media, which sent correspondents to Kabul in good time to report on the return of Taliban rule”.
Raab’s troubles began on Sunday when he was “spotted at the five-star Amirandes Hotel in Crete”, which “styles itself as a ‘sparkling boutique resort for the privileged and perceptive’”, the Daily Mail reported earlier this week. He left later the same day, after the Taliban had stormed into Afghanistan’s capital, and arrived at Gatwick at 1.40am on Monday, “looking stressed”.
Boris Johnson was also on holiday in the West Country but caught the train back to Downing Street on Sunday.
Raab later insisted that he did not spend “all day lounging on the beach” as Kabul fell, but was taking part in a series of meetings from the hotel and only went outside to see his family “episodically”.
Nevertheless, shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy said that “for the foreign secretary to go AWOL during an international crisis of this magnitude is nothing short of shameful”.
And it was not just opposition MPs laying into Raab. Tom Newton Dunn tweeted that there is “deep anger” that Defence Secretary Wallace, who served in the Scots Guards in the 1990s, “was alone in trying to assemble a coalition to take the departing US’s place”.
Newton Dunn said he has been told the Foreign Office “had no interest in joining the MoD effort to find only an extra 3,000 troops and accompanying air power that would have replaced the US’s footprint, despite ample warning”, with one scathing senior official describing Raab as “a low grade, risk-averse lawyer”.
Wallace choked up on LBC radio earlier this week as he admitted it was a “deep regret” that “some people won’t get back” from Afghanistan, as the US and its Nato allies ended 20 years of military operations.
Sources say the “frustrated minister told colleagues he believed there would be ‘a reckoning’ for the Foreign Office after the crisis”, according to The Guardian.
Wallace apparently complained that diplomats had been “on the first plane out” of Afghanistan, while young soldiers and Ministry of Defence staff were left to handle the fallout, “helping frantic efforts to process claims from up to 4,000 Afghans thought to be eligible for resettlement in the UK amid chaotic scenes at Kabul’s international airport”, said the paper.
An MoD spokesperson told the Guardian: “At all times, the secretaries of state for defence, foreign and Home Office have worked side by side in dealing with this crisis.”
