PM vows to ‘shift heaven and earth’ to get more people out of Afghanistan with over 14,500 evacuated so far

Published

3 years ago

August 27, 2021

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Boris Johnson has pledged to “shift heaven and earth” to get more people out of Afghanistan after the 31 August deadline.

Speaking to reporters, the prime minister shared his “great sense of regret” that more individuals could not be airlifted out of Kabul during what he described as “the first phase” of the evacuation process.

The PM also confirmed the death of two British nationals and a child of another UK national as he condemned the “contemptible” attack at Kabul airport on Thursday.

“Of course, as we come down to the final hours of the operation there will sadly be people who haven’t got through, people who might qualify,” he said.

“What I would say to them is that we will shift heaven and earth to help them get out, we will do whatever we can in the second phase.”

Afghanistan latest – live updates as UK’s Kabul evacuation enters ‘final hours’

When asked whether the scenes in Afghanistan in the last few days amounted to a national humiliation, the PM told reporters the circumstances were “extremely difficult and extremely horrible”.

“It’s certainly not something that… the timing of this is certainly not the one that this country would have chosen, and I think that everybody understands that,” the PM said.

He also repeated his warning to the Taliban that if they want engagement with the west, they must allow people to leave Afghanistan.

“But the crucial thing is that the Taliban authorities, the new government – however it is composed – have got to understand that if they want to have engagement with the west, if they want to have a relationship with us, then safe passage for those is absolutely paramount,” the PM said.

“There will be people who are eligible, whether they’re UK nationals who have chosen not to come forward yet, or people who were interpreters and others who haven’t been able to get to come forward to Hamid Karzai International Airport so far.

“And what I say to them, is that we will shift heaven and earth to get you out, and we will use all the leverage that we have with the Taliban to make sure that they understand it.”

The PM added that the UK government will “continue to talk to the Taliban” and that the group are “certainly no friends of Daesh, the Islamic State Khorasan Province” who claim responsibility for Thursday’s attack.

RAF personnel have now lifted 13,000 people from the airport in Kabul to the UK, the prime minister said, adding: “We have never seen anything like it in our lifetimes.”

Earlier on Friday, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace confirmed the UK’s evacuation mission at Kabul’s airport has “a matter of hours” left and no more people will be called forward.

Mr Wallace told Kay Burley on Sky News the effort was into its “final hours” after the closure of the main processing centre in Kabul at the Baron Hotel near the airport.

He said: “We, at 4.30 this morning, UK-time, closed the Baron Hotel, shut the processing centre and the gates were closed at Abbey Gate.

“We will process the people that we’ve brought with us, the 1,000 people approximately in the airfield now and we will seek a way to continue to find a few people in the crowds where we can, but overall the main processing is now closed and we have a matter of hours.

“The sad fact is not every single one will get out.”

The Baron Hotel was closed just hours after two attacks, claimed by terror group ISIS-K, outside the airport killed 13 US troops and 95 Afghans.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was a “dark day” for Afghanistan and called for an “urgent plan” for those eligible Afghans who were left behind.

Defence sources have told Sky News British troops have also started to leave Afghanistan, with about 100 out of the 1,000 there having already left.

The Ministry of Defence said 13,708 people have so far been evacuated since 13 August, including 7,975 under the Afghanistan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) for Afghans currently and formerly employed by the UK, and their families.

Mr Wallace also said he had authorised the loosening of regulations on numbers “to pack people in” on the final flights out. It is expected about 600 people will now be able to board military transporters.

He would not confirm whether some British troops would remain in Kabul until the 31 August deadline the US has set.

After the US warned of an imminent terror attack on Wednesday, most countries ended their evacuation efforts on Thursday ahead of the bombing.

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

Published

11 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.

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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.