Dominic Raab says ‘with benefit of hindsight’ he would have come home from holiday earlier

Published

3 years ago

August 25, 2021

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Dominic Raab has admitted that with the “benefit of hindsight” he would have come back from holiday earlier amid the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Speaking to Sky News in his first TV interview since the crisis unfolded, the foreign secretary said it is “nonsense” to say he was “lounging around on the beach all day” while on his holiday.

He faced calls to quit last week after it emerged he remained on his luxury holiday in Crete instead of coming back to deal with the Afghanistan crisis.

“The stuff about me being lounging around on the beach all day is just nonsense,” he said.

“The stuff about me paddleboarding, nonsense, the sea was actually closed, it was a red notice.

“I was focused on the Cobra meetings, the Foreign Office team, the director and the director general, and the international engagement.”

Mr Raab added that about 2,000 people have been flown back to the UK from Kabul airport in the last 24 hours and that “the system is operating at full speed”.

“We will use every last remaining hour and day to get everyone we can back, the British nationals, the Afghans who worked so loyally for us, we are getting the Chevening scholars back, also women’s rights defenders and journalists.”

He added: “Mono-nationals, so single-nationality UK who have got documentation, the lion’s share, almost all of them that want to come out have been brought home.

“The ones that are remaining, and we have done an amazing job, two and a half thousand UK nationals if you go back to April… what remains are rather complex cases, large family units where one or other may be documented or may be clearly a national, but it’s not clear whether the rest of them are.”

When asked about reports the airport could switch back to allowing people to leave on civilian aircraft rather than military flights, Mr Raab said: “We do engage with the Taliban militarily on the ground, and in Doha with the political representation.

“We would like to see Kabul airport go back to being functional. That will require the security on the ground, it will require it to be done safely, and of course it will require the Taliban to live up to their assurances about allowing safe passage out.

“They’ve actually so far tried to be constructive, as we have seen with the numbers we have got, and tried to be constructive in their own way.

“And what we have then got to do is test them beyond the withdrawal date, will they still allow safe passage, as they have undertaken, will they allow humanitarian groups the permissive environment to be able to operate?

“So, there is a next stage of engagement, not recognition, engagement with the Taliban, and we will hold them very clearly to the assurances that they are already stating.”

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Mr Raab added that time will be taken to withdraw the UK military operation in Afghanistan.

“The military planners will work out how much time they need to withdraw their equipment, their staff, and what’s really important is we will make the maximum use of all the time we have left,” he said.

The Taliban has put an exit date of 31 August for all foreign evacuations.

And after Boris Johnson failed to secure an extension to a the US deadline for all western forces to leave, reports have suggested UK evacuation flights from Kabul may have to stop this week.

The Guardian newspaper reported on Tuesday that the last Royal Air Force aircraft carrying Afghans to safety from Kabul airport could even be in the next “24 to 36 hours”.

But defence sources described the timeline as speculative and said it was not “set in stone”.

Analysis, Tamara Cohen, political correspondent

The Foreign Secretary’s defence today of his ill-timed beach holiday as Kabul fell, has been to say it had no effect on the running of the evacuation, and that he was kept fully informed.

The airlift, he says, is now running at “full capacity” and the RAF will use every remaining hour – although how many hours are left is uncertain – to ferry thousands more people out. Meanwhile as our brave troops finish their job, he and the Prime Minister are rallying the West to form a united front to engage with the Taliban.

Not everyone is convinced. Mr Raab, who may appear before MPs on the foreign affairs committee for an emergency session next week, faces ongoing scrutiny about the government’s grip on Afghanistan after all the lives and taxpayers’ money expended there.

Senior Conservatives question the “bandwidth” in the foreign office over the past year; our own intelligence, and whether UK challenged key aspects of the US evacuation plan for example on the decision to close Bagram air base. “It’s bigger than Dominic Raab’s holiday, it’s how the machine operated, but his absence was a symptom of it”, one told me.

The angry debate in Parliament last week showed deep misgivings across the political spectrum about what role the government sees “Global Britain” playing internationally, which will be harder to brush aside.

A team of more than 1,000 British troops and diplomats running the UK’s evacuation mission on the ground will need a period of time to pack up their equipment and depart ahead of the final US exit date of 31 August.

It means that evacuation flights for Afghan civilians desperate to flee the country after the Taliban takeover will have to stop at least a number of days before then.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that US troops have started to pull out of Kabul already – but the tempo of flights and the number of people being airlifted to safety remains high.

More than 9,200 people – British nationals as well as Afghans who have worked with British troops and diplomats over the past two decades but are now in danger – have been flown to safety in the UK since 13 August as part of what has been dubbed Operation Pitting.

Politics

Trump makes big promises about crypto in US — But can he deliver?

Published

2 hours ago

November 2, 2024

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Trump makes big promises about crypto in US — But can he deliver?

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Crypto volatility may spike if US election is ‘too close to call’ —FalconX

Published

8 hours ago

November 2, 2024

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Crypto volatility may spike if US election is ‘too close to call’ —FalconX

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Politics

Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch to be crowned Tory leader today – but whoever wins contest faces daunting task

Published

10 hours ago

November 2, 2024

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Robert Jenrick or Kemi Badenoch to be crowned Tory leader today - but whoever wins contest faces daunting task

The next leader of the Conservative party will be announced today, following a run-off between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.

The winner will replace Rishi Sunak as the leader of the opposition, after he led the party to a crushing election defeat in July, losing almost two thirds of its MPs.

His successor faces the daunting task of rebuilding the Tory party after years of division, scandal and economic turbulence, which saw Labour eject them from power by a landslide.

Politics latest: Budget given ‘clean bill of health’

Voting by tens of thousands of party members, who need to have joined at least 90 days ago, closed on Thursday. Both candidates have claimed the result will be close.

The Conservatives do not disclose how many members the party has, but the figure was about 172,000 in 2022, and research suggests they are disproportionately affluent, older white men.

Both candidates are seen as on the party’s right wing. Kemi Badenoch, 44, is the former trade secretary, who was born in London to middle-class Nigerian parents but spent most of her childhood in Lagos.

After moving back to the UK aged 16, she stayed with a family friend while taking her A-levels, and has spoken of her time working at McDonald’s as a teenager.

Having studied computer science at Sussex University, she then worked as a software engineer before entering London politics and becoming MP for Saffron Walden in Essex in 2017.

Ms Badenoch prides herself on being outspoken and has said the Conservatives lost because they “talked right and governed left”. But her critics paint her as abrasive and prone to misspeaking.

At the Conservative Party conference, a crucial staging post in the contest, she began her speech which followed three other male candidates by saying: “Nice speeches, boys, but I think you all know I’m the one everyone’s been waiting for.”

Her rival Robert Jenrick, 42, has been on a political journey. Elected as a Cameroon Conservative in 2014, he was one of the rising star ministers who swung behind Boris Johnson as prime minister and was later a vocal supporter of Rishi Sunak.

But he resigned as immigration minister in December 2023, claiming Sunak’s government was breaking its promises to cut immigration.

The MP for Newark in Nottinghamshire says he had a “working-class” upbringing in Wolverhampton. He read history at Cambridge University and worked at Christie’s auctioneers before winning a by-election.

After a long ministerial career where he was seen as mild-mannered, he is said to have been “radicalised” by his time at the Home Office and has focused his campaign on a promise to slash immigration and leave the European Convention on Human Rights to “stand for our nation and our culture, our identity and our way of life”.

He has put forward more policies than his rival, but attracted criticism for some of his claims – including that Britain’s former colonies owe the Empire a “debt of gratitude”.

A survey of party members by the website Conservative Home last week put Kemi Badenoch in the lead by 55 points to Mr Jenrick’s 31 with polls still open.

James Cleverly, the shadow home secretary and seen as a more centrist candidate was knocked out of the race last month. One of his supporters, the Conservative peer and former Scotland leader Ruth Davidson, has predicted neither Mr Jenrick nor Ms Badenoch will stay as leader until the next general election.

She told the Sky News Electoral Dysfunction podcast: “I’ve now voted for Robert Jenrick, who I don’t think will win. I struggle to believe that the person that’s the next leader of the Tory party is going to take us into the next election in five years’ time and I struggle to believe that they’re going to leave the leadership at a time of their own choosing.”

Henry Hill, deputy editor of ConHome, said the contest which Tory officials decided would take almost three months, has not led to enough scrutiny – because the MP rounds of voting took so long.

“We know much less [about them] than I think we should”, he said. “The problem with this contest is the party decided to go really long, but at the same time, they confined the membership vote – with just the final two – to just three weeks, and ballots dropped halfway through that process.

“We had months and months with loads of candidates in the race, but also that was the MP rounds and you’d think the MPs will have a chance to get to know these people already. For the actual choice the members are going to be making, there has been barely any time to scrutinise that.

He added: “I think the party remembers Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak taking weeks to take lumps out of each other in 2022 and wanted to avoid that. But it means the two campaigns haven’t really been attacking each other and that tends to be how you expose people’s weaknesses.”

After 14 years in government under five prime ministers, it is not since David Cameron in 2005 that the party has elected a leader to go into opposition – with a long road until the next general election.

Veteran ex-MP Graham Brady, who served as chair of the backbench 1922 committee, told Sky News that the position was more hopeful than after the 1997 landslide.

He said: “The biggest challenge for a leader of the opposition in these circumstances is just to be heard, to be noticed. I came into the House of Commons in 1997 at the time of that huge Blair landslide.

“We worked very, very hard in opposition during that parliament, and at the next general election [in 2001], we made a net gain of one seat.

“Now, there is a huge difference between now and 1997. The Blair government remained very popular and Tony Blair personally remained very popular through that whole parliament and beyond. And in 100 days or so, Keir Starmer has already fallen way behind.

“So I think we’ve got a great opportunity. I don’t think we’re up against an insuperable challenge, but it’s a big challenge.”

Kate Fall, now Baroness Fall, worked with Lord Cameron in opposition and later in Downing Street when he was prime minister in the coalition government. She said the next leader needed to keep the party “united and disciplined”.

“The first thing is to think about why we lost. The second thing is what do we have to say? Then they need to be agile, they need to be reactive, but pick their fight, not fight over everything. They also need to get out and about,” she said.

Lord Cameron travelled around the country holding question and answer sessions called Cameron Direct. “When you’re prime minister, you can’t do that as much as you like. But as leader of the opposition you can get out, talk to people, we thought it was very trendy to have a podcast and so on.”

She says this week’s budget gives the next leader “an ideological divide” to get into, but warns that the next leader must not risk alienating former Tories who switched to Labour and the Lib Dems.

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The leader of the opposition will cut their teeth at weekly Prime Minister’s Questions sessions opposite Sir Keir Starmer and respond to set piece events such as the budget.

They will need to get the party’s campaign machine ready for the local elections in England in May 2025, Scottish elections in 2026 and the next general election expected in 2029.