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Pressed by presenter Kay Burley on his time spent reacting to the crisis, he added: ‘We wanted to make sure we had the basic facts in order to make clear decisions.īoris Johnson called ‘Big Dog’ in plan to save his skin as MPs revolt ‘That is the biggest evacuation in living memory, the only country that got more people out was the United States, and it took an absolutely heroic and Herculean effort to achieve that under incredibly difficult conditions.’
Raab said: ‘Well I think you can see that we didn’t do that, because in two weeks we pulled off the evacuation of 15,000 people. ‘This evidence raises serious questions about the leadership of the Foreign Office, and I look forward to putting these to officials, including former Afghanistan Ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow.’ĭefending himself on Sky News this morning, the Foreign Secretary rubbished claims that Britain prioritised the evacuation of pets over people, calling them ‘just not accurate’.Īmong Mr Marshall’s many allegations is that Pen Farthing’s animal rescue charity Nowzad was helped, despite it being a ‘direct trade-off’ against rescuing Afghans. Raab defended the evacuation of Kabul as the ‘biggest in living memory’ (Picture: AFP/Getty Images)
Mr Marshall alleged that Raab – now Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister – ‘did not fully understand the situation’.Įmails were opened but not actioned, and he felt ‘the purpose of this system was to allow the Prime Minister and the then Foreign Secretary to inform MPs that there were no unread emails’. It comes as FCDO officials and the ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Laurie Bristow, are due to give evidence to the committee today. Meanwhile junior officials were ‘scared by being asked to make hundreds of life and death decisions about which they knew nothing’, it is claimed. He said that no member of the team working on these cases had ‘studied Afghanistan, worked on Afghanistan previously, or had a detailed knowledge of Afghanistan’. Mr Marshall states that ‘it is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban’.