The Foreign Secretary, the phone call and the airlift: should Raab go now?

Journalists know that when a crisis breaks, you hit the phones. Call anybody and everybody who might make a difference. If someone won’t take your call, pull rank, pull strings, pull any

lever that will get through. If the boss is out of the office, go and find them. If you are the boss, don’t delegate. It’s your job to make that call.

In Whitehall, it doesn’t seem to work like that. By the middle of last week, when the Afghan government was already losing one province after another to the Taliban, none of the Sir

Humphreys at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) dared to ask Dominic Raab whether it might be wise to cancel his no doubt long-awaited and well-earned holiday. Even as

the Taliban blitzkrieg was approaching Kabul, the Foreign Secretary was jetting off to Crete. And the Sir Humphrey in question — the Permanent Secretary at the FCDO, Sir Philip Barton — was

also on holiday. He still is. So are his opposite numbers at the Home Office and the MoD.

Thanks to some good investigative journalism by the Daily Mail, we now know what happened next. On Friday, as it became clear that an emergency evacuation of British nationals and others

would be needed, Raab was asked by officials to make a crucial call to the Afghan Foreign Minister to clear the way for the operation. The Foreign Secretary, still on leave, refused to make

the call. When asked about this, officials claimed that he had delegated the call to a junior minister, Lord (Zac) Goldsmith, but that the Afghan Foreign Minister had refused to take his

call. It now appears that this story was untrue. The call was never actually made. The Mail quotes the FCDO as admitting that “it was not possible to arrange a call before the Afghan

government collapsed”.

Raab did not return to his desk until Monday, by which time Kabul had fallen and the airport was besieged by thousands of desperate people trying to escape. Some 950 British paratroopers had

been flown in to protect the airlift, codenamed Operation Pitting. The only diplomat actually there and taking charge of the evacuation on the British side was the Ambassador, Sir Laurie

Bristow. He would deserve a knighthood for his courage this week, if he did not already have one. Not until Wednesday was the visa processing centre outside the airport fully operational. By

this time, the Taliban were in full control of the airport perimeter. In the Commons, the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace admitted that it would no longer be possible to rescue everyone. Some

400 UK nationals and their families have been evacuated since Sunday, but we do not know how many are still there, nor how long we have left to get them out.

To say that the circumstances surrounding Operation Pitting have been difficult would be an understatement. But to say that everyone involved has done their best would be, to put it

politely, an exaggeration. Raab has wriggled like a fish to minimise his dereliction of duty, but he is not off the hook, nor likely to be. Even if the notorious phone call would ultimately

have made no difference, he should still have taken it — if necessary sitting in a hotel room in his bathing trunks. He certainly should not have allowed officials to muddy the waters about

what happened — or didn’t happen.

In Greek philosophy, there is a famous paradox, attributed to Epimides. He said: “All Cretans are liars.” But he was himself a Cretan. So was he lying about his compatriots? We might update

the Cretan liar paradox. All British Foreign Secretaries tell the truth — except on holiday in Crete. But the Foreign Secretary was on holiday in Crete. Now he can’t seem to get his story

straight about what happened there. So is Dominic Raab a liar?

The mere fact that the question is left hanging is bad enough, of course. Hence Lisa Nandy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, has been calling ever more insistently for Raab’s resignation. In

mitigation, one must concede that there is no proof that anyone at the FCDO set out to mislead the public. The evacuation is still going on and now is probably not yet the time for

reckonings. Raab has experience of tough Brexit negotiations and he deputised for the Prime Minister at the height of the pandemic. Hitherto he was seen as a safe pair of hands. If Lisa

Nandy had ever actually run anything, let alone something as difficult as Operation Pitting, her critique might have had more resonance. A Hilary Benn or an Yvette Cooper would have real

impact, both inside the Commons and in the media. But then they would probably not have demanded resignations in the middle of a crisis.

When Operation Pitting is over and it is possible to make an overall assessment, Dominic Raab will have some tough questions to answer. He will be asked about the failure to anticipate the

Taliban blitzkrieg, the lack of contingency planning for the evacuation, the very fact that so many British nationals were still in Kabul — not to mention the thousands of Afghans to whom we

owe a debt of honour, most of whom may now be stranded. And of course his own conduct will be scrutinised in minute detail. It may well be that the Foreign Secretary’s position will

eventually become untenable.

Right now, however, lives are at stake. The Americans are reported to still have more than 10,000 nationals in Kabul, plus up to 70,000 Afghan “affiliates”. Even at the current rate of 2,000

a day, it is hard to believe that all of them will have been airlifted out by the August 31 deadline set by President Biden. That deadline is in any case no longer set in stone. So the

window for the British to evacuate our own people, both Britons and Afghans, may be open for a little longer. The Taliban could close it at any moment, but we must hope for the best.

This is not Dunkirk, 1940. This is not the Berlin Airlift, 1948-49. It is too soon to say how history will judge Kabul, 2021. For the moment, though, it would be nice if the ministers and

mandarins in Whitehall could pull their fingers out. There are moments in history when a debonair display of sang froid is in place. Francis Drake had time to finish his game of bowls and

still beat the Spanish Armada. This is not one of those moments.

It’s too late for the Foreign Secretary to call Kabul. But it’s not too late for him to call Washington, even if it means making a nuisance of himself at the State Department. Dominic Raab

should call Antony Blinken and keep on calling him until this is over. It’s the least he can do now to redeem himself.

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