Dominic Raab was quite sure the stable door was closed when he went on holiday

The foreign secretary survived his grilling by a combination of honesty and obfuscation, writes John Rentoul

Dominic Raab thought it was ‘unlikely Kabul would fall this year’ (AFP via Getty)

If, after the horse had bolted, the stable owner had set up a committee to find out who was responsible for shutting the doors, it would have looked something like Wednesday’s session of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, said everything had looked secure before he went on holiday, and he was quite happy leaving matters in the hands of subordinates and other departments, and anyway he was working the whole time.

Raab showed the same calmness under fire that he had demonstrated when the prime minister was taken into hospital at the height of the coronavirus crisis leaving him in charge of a government that – behind the scenes, and according to Dominic Cummings – was in an advanced state of panic.

Tom Tugendhat, the committee chair, read out a secret internal Foreign Office memo dated 22 July – that is, before the foreign secretary went on holiday – warning of “rapid Taliban advances”. This could lead, the document said, “to the fall of cities, collapse of security forces, Taliban returned to power, mass displacement and significant humanitarian need”.

Raab was fluency itself. That was one of a range of possibilities, he said, but “the central assessment that we were operating to” was that “you’d see a steady deterioration from that point [the end of August] and it was unlikely Kabul would fall this year”. This was deemed the “most likely” scenario by the Joint Intelligence Committee and the military, he said.

This represented a significant retreat from his attempts in interviews on Tuesday to suggest that the “military intelligence” – which is the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence – had been faulty. He was now happy to accept collective responsibility, provided it was still spread widely: the Joint Intelligence Committee includes representatives of MI6 and GCHQ, both of which are answerable to Raab.

Indeed, Raab’s tactics for surviving the committee’s hostile onslaught were to be polite and respectful to the committee and its members – and to be disarmingly honest.

The idea that he had thought it was “unlikely Kabul would fall this year”, for example, implied that it was considered likely to fall within months. If he thought that, the Afghan army and the Afghan government might have thought it too, in which case it should have occurred to him that it was likely to fall within days, which is what happened.

Easy to say with hindsight, of course, but hindsight is the currency of select-committee hearings, and Raab was surprisingly candid about why some people – he never quite specified who – might have carried on blithely thinking that an emergency evacuation wouldn’t be needed.

There was an “optimism bias that the Americans would change their mind”, he said. “There was some wishful thinking in some quarters internationally that the Biden administration would change.” Those quarters did not include him, of course. “I always thought,” he said, more than once, that President Biden meant what he said to the American people in the election campaign.

Nevertheless, Raab offered a thoughtful insight into why some people – in all countries that were part of the Afghan mission – might have been wrong in their assessment of the Taliban’s capacity to overrun the country. After two decades of “sacrifice”, “the desire to make it work, the belief that you can complete the task” made it “difficult emotionally to extract yourself”. Who the “yourself” was in that sentence was completely obscure, because Raab himself had “always thought” we might have to get out in a hurry, and had been working on contingency plans since April, May or June.

It was a remarkable combination of honesty and obfuscation that allowed him to say a lot without sounding too evasive, and without making himself more unpopular with the ministers left fuming by his attempt to saddle them with blame in his media interviews the previous day.

Boris Johnson, definitely not on holiday in Somerset, who will have looked up from his non-stop work to glance at Raab’s performance on the television, will no doubt be pleased that his deputy (as first secretary of state) was soaking up a lot of the criticism that will be coming his way when parliament returns next week.

As he resumes working through the papers in his red box, the prime minister will be satisfied that the foreign secretary has well and truly closed the stable door.