Raab ‘not confident’ on how many people eligible to come to the UK remain trapped in Afghanistan

Published

3 years ago

September 1, 2021

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Dominic Raab has said he is “not confident with any precision” about how many people who are entitled to come to the UK remain trapped in Afghanistan.

Facing questions on the UK’s withdrawal by members of the Foreign Affairs Committee, the foreign secretary says his best estimate of the number of UK nationals and their family members, Afghans who might qualify for resettlement because they assisted the UK, and other vulnerable people who are yet to get out is in the “low hundreds”.

But Mr Raab was unable to give a more precise number when asked by Labour MP Chris Bryant “whether this is nearer 100 or 400”.

“Any number that we haven’t got out… is too many,” he told MPs on the committee, adding: “I can’t give you a definitive answer.”

And asked to confirm the prime minister’s assertion that the “overwhelming majority of people who worked for us are out”, the foreign secretary continued: “I’m not confident with precision to be able to give you a set number, but I am confident that the prime minister is right – that we’ve got the overwhelming number out.”

Mr Raab also confirmed he will be travelling to the region after the hearing concludes on Wednesday afternoon for talks about the rescue of those left behind in Kabul after the departure of the remaining foreign forces.

The foreign secretary, who faced criticism after it emerged he was on holiday in Crete while the Taliban was advancing on Kabul, refused multiple times to offer further details about when he went abroad.

Describing questions about his trip as a “fishing expedition” and “pretty partisan”, Mr Raab repeated that he “would not have gone away with the benefit of hindsight”.

He added: “I am not going to start adding to, frankly, the fishing expedition beyond the facts that I have articulated and the fulsome statement and having answered questions on this continuously.”

The foreign secretary also could not say how many of his department’s ministers are currently overseas.

He told MPs he did not have “the precise detail” to answer this question, but that there is “a rota system” in place to ensure cover.

“We’re always very careful about signalling travel movements because of the security implications,” he added.

Mr Raab maintained that he has remained fully engaged with the situation in Afghanistan, noting that he had “over 40 meetings or telephone calls where Afghanistan was on the agenda” between mid-March and 30 August – which works out as “broadly one every four days”.

He added that the “central assessment” of the UK government had been that Kabul was “unlikely” to fall this year.

“The central assessment that we were operating to – and it was certainly backed up by the JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) and the military – is that the most likely, the central proposition, was that given the troop withdrawal by the end of August, you’d see a steady deterioration from that point and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year,” he said.

The foreign secretary noted that this assessment remained “until late”, but that work to develop an evacuation plan was ongoing from June.

“We started planning in June for the contingency of an evacuation and therefore a full drawdown of the embassy,” he told the committee.

Asked by Conservative MP Bob Seely whether the government was caught out “slightly on the hop” due to an “intelligence failure”, the foreign secretary replied: “We’ve got a very professional way of approaching these things but when they’re wrong… you need to look at how you correct that.”

The foreign secretary also outlined the three categories of people in Afghanistan who are eligible to resettle in the UK as British nationals, those who have shown loyalty to the UK and an “asylum-related” group “based on international law”.

He repeated that the government is “doing everything we can” to get people out of the country, adding that “the proof” of this is that 17,000 people have been transported to the UK “since April”.

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November 2, 2024

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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

Published

16 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.