A senior Conservative MP is demanding an immediate end to the “unseemly and unprofessional” row between the foreign and defence secretaries over Afghanistan, warning that it is further damaging the UK’s already battered reputation on the world stage. Writing for the Observer Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Commons select committee on defence, says the crisis has exposed the weakness of the UK as a global player, and calls for a complete overhaul of the way foreign policy is handled in Whitehall. Referring to weeks of public argument between the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, and defence secretary, Ben Wallace, over whether the fall of Kabul to the Taliban should have been foreseen, and who in Whitehall was more to blame, Ellwood says such public spats between people in positions of power and responsibility are further harming the UK’s international standing.
“We’ve lost the passion and the art of leadership – and have caused further reputational damage in the unattractive blame game over Afghanistan that has played out so publicly. This unseemly, unprofessional squabbling must stop,” Ellwood writes. Ellwood’s frustrations with Raab and Wallace were echoed by other senior Conservatives. Former cabinet minister David Davis said Boris Johnson must summon both ministers for a dressing down, at the very least. “He should call them in and tell them to shut up and then put No 10’s effort behind a cross-government approach which accepts its share of the blame, but that doesn’t try to load it off to one minister or another.” Another former Tory cabinet minister said that only Johnson could have allowed two cabinet ministers of senior rank, and in such sensitive posts, to argue publicly while people died in Afghanistan. “It is unconscionable. Any other prime minister would have sacked them, but this is Boris Johnson.” Merely dealing with them with a cabinet reshuffle would not be to rise to the scale of the challenge, Ellwood says. He calls for a complete rethink of how Whitehall deals with foreign policy at a time when the UK is no longer such a close ally of the US and when its relations with European neighbours are in serious disrepair. “If we are serious about rekindling any status of global leadership, as we’ve done in the past, then there’s more to do than just knocking heads together or moving the deck chairs around,” Ellwood says. “Whitehall requires a complete overhaul. Our foreign policy is too reactive and lacking in confidence, it doesn’t set us apart for what we stand for, simply for some things we stand against.
“Despite the fanfare of our Global Britain branding, the Whitehall bandwidth is simply too limited and not sufficiently strategic to offer the big picture thought-leadership and which has the potential to help generate solutions to international problems.” Either Johnson or Raab is expected to give a statement to MPs early next week on the crisis. Over recent days Wallace has said he believed “the game was up” in Afghanistan and the western-backed government would fall “back in July” – and that plans to remove British diplomats, Afghan interpreters and others had to be accelerated. However, on Wednesday, Raab told MPs that he had believed the Afghan capital would remain safe until next year, a view supported by the prevailing intelligence assessment. The former Tory prime minister, John Major, on Saturday criticised the withdrawal of western forces from Afghanistan as a “strategically very stupid” decision, saying he had found it to be “morally incomprehensible”. Speaking at a Financial Times festival, Major added: “I think we were wrong to leave Afghanistan, we were wrong morally, but also wrong practically.” His comments follow equally strong condemnation of the withdrawal of US and UK forces by Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time of the 2001 invasion. The former Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan, interviewed by the Centre Write magazine of the Tory thinktank Bright Blue, said that UK foreign policy was strong on slogans but sadly weak on substance.
“‘Global Britain’ is utterly meaningless, until they explain the details of what it means in practice. It is nothing more than a slogan which conjures up a wish to play our part in the world, whatever that means, and to signal that we still think we matter, without saying how, where, and to what extent. Rather like ‘levelling up’, these vacuous slogans amount to nothing unless properly defined.” Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda and a member of the foreign affairs committee, said the way the two cabinet ministers had been allowed to continue in open disagreement was “disgraceful”. “It is evidence of a dysfunctional government. And we have three departments – Home Office, the MoD and Foreign Office, running separate channels for bringing back people from Afghanistan,” Bryant said. “There will be a lot of anger at how this has been allowed to happen when parliament returns.”