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The government is insisting that a key phone call passed up by Dominic Raab which has led to huge pressure on the Foreign Secretary to resign would not have made a difference to the speed of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban.
Labour and other opposition parties have said Raab must step down or be sacked by Boris Johnson after The Mail reported that last Friday he failed to make a crucial phone call to Afghanistan’s foreign minister Hanif Atmar when advised to do so by Foreign Office officials.
Raab, who was on holiday in Crete at the time, could not contact Atmar to discuss evacuating interpreters from Afghanistan because he was busy on other calls, according to the government.
It has since emerged that the call did not happen even after it was delegated to a junior minister.
Raab’s position has come under intense pressure over his handling of the crisis in Afghanistan, with several government officials anonymously lambasting him in Friday’s newspapers.
One civil servant told The Guardian that the Foreign Secretary “refused to be contacted on basically anything” while on holiday in Greece as the Taliban swept across Afghanistan.
Raab’s colleague James Heappey, the Armed Forced Minister, sought to defend the beleaguered Foreign Secretary this morning, insisting in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the phone call wouldn’t have made a difference to the situation in Afghanistan if it had been made.
“I don’t have the details of individual ministers’ call sheets,” he told Today.
“What I can say, as my colleague the Secretary of State said yesterday, is the reality is no one phone call would have changed the trajectory of either the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government nor the speed at which we were able to get the airlift up and running.
“I understand why this is of interest to the media in the UK at the moment.
“But frankly my focus, and the focus of my colleagues at the moment, is making sure we can extract as many people as possible from Kabul.”
Heappey said he didn’t know why the call wasn’t made but doubled down on his claim that it wouldn’t have sped up the UK’s ongoing operation to evacuate people from Kabul.
“If our foreign secretary has no influence over what happens in that country and no ability to get out the people who’ve helped us… that seems to me to be even more shameful”
Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy calls for Dominic Raab to resignhttps://t.co/yJyGObpLLB pic.twitter.com/JjRaNRptnM
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) August 19, 2021
“I don’t know why the call wasn’t made and I don’t know the detail or who should have made the call and who shouldn’t,” he said.
“I am certain that by the time it was recommended that the call should have been made the trajectory was set and the speed of collapse would not have been changed by a single phone call.
“And actually the plans we had in place in order to initiate the airlift would not have been accelerated because there are military physics in how long it would have taken to get those things up and running anyway.”
The minister said the government successfully evacuated 963 people from Kabul yesterday, which was “big acceleration on the day before.”
The government is likely to face questions today over why three of the country’s most senior civil servants, whose departments are all heavily involved in the UK mission to evacuate people from Afhanistan, are on holiday as the crisis continues to unfold, as reported by The Times.
Home Office Permanent Secretary Matthew. Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Philip Barton, and Ministry of Defence Permanent Secretary David Williams still haven’t returned from their holidays.
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