A therapist once introduced me to a strategy which I’ll paraphrase as “boring on purpose” – when someone’s speaking, and you find your mind wandering, the fault may not be yours. It could be that they’re being repetitive, vague, unreactive, wadding each sentence with generalities like cavity wall insulation, for a reason: to resist the intimacy of your full attention, to divert you from whatever it is they don’t want to discuss. If it’s a useful tactic in everyday life, that’s nothing on its deployment in front of a select committee. Dominic Raab was previously known for his pugnacity, prone to saying more than he meant to, in irritation. That trait has been ironed out in whatever word-management course ministers are now obliged to attend, and the foreign affairs select committee, chaired by Tom Tugendhat, was treated to an altogether different man – quietly monotonous, defeatist without being penitent, trotting out the same rote phrases like a copy-and-paste job from the clipboard remnants of his bleached out personality. “Optimism bias”; “Turkey, Qatar, Nato”; “when the safety and security allow”; “rapid deployment team”; “we’re not comparing like for like”, the same answers came out time and again, sounding like facts but never close enough to the question to be factual. Committee members, by contrast, kept it as blunt and simple as they could. “Everyone was caught by surprise,” said Bob Seely. “Why was that?” Raab unfurled a trick I haven’t seen before, or maybe I have but only today saw the joins: shifting blame in the most nebulous terms, he cited this “optimism bias”, in the Foreign Office, in the government, in the world, spread so wide that the blame, once he’d finished, was nothing more than a patina, coating everyone – hell, wouldn’t we all, if we’re really honest with ourselves, prefer things to go well? Everyone was wrong about everything – they all thought the Americans would change their minds, that the Taliban would change their spots. All except Raab himself, who knew after the US elections that the public had lost its appetite for forever war, and had always cautioned that the Taliban were “unlikely to engage”. It was a bizarre defence, distilling down to one of two options – the foreign secretary had either said all this but no one had listened, or he’d kept it to himself, in keeping with his new self-effacing character. Alicia Kearns, Conservative MP for Rutland and Melton, on solid ground with time spent on the foreign affairs select committee, tried to pin him down. If nobody saw this coming, apart from Raab the shy, how is it that the French evacuation was so much more successful than the British? Labour’s Claudia Webbe returned to this question much later, and the answer was the same – the situations weren’t like for like. He never said why not. Understandably, all the committee members – Tugendhat, Chris Bryant and the SNP’s Stewart McDonald with their own distinctive brands of tenacity – pressed the foreign secretary for dates, names, anything to find something solid in the soup of generalities. When did he last visit Afghanistan or Pakistan? Which diplomats did he speak to, from which nations? When did he issue the non-combatant evacuation order? What day did he go on holiday? Mostly, he couldn’t remember, but more remarkable were the sashays into defiant irrelevance. “Why can’t you even speak on behalf of the Ministry of Defence on how many people under Arap [the relocation scheme] are outstanding?” Bryant asked. “This is a form of prioritising according to the categories that matter most,” he replied. Did he speak to neighbouring nations, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan? He spoke to tons of people. Did he get things wrong? People get things wrong all the time. “Economically, a lot of things are wrong.” I’m sorry, what? If you’ve ever had the unhappy experience of asking a loved one whether their ex was at a party, to hear the reply, “there were loads of people at the party”, that’s about the level of evasiveness they were dealing with, amateurish but stubborn. The only thing that riled him– excepting the female voice, given the heavy exasperation with which he intoned “Claudia” and “Alicia” – were questions about his holiday, the exact date he left and why he didn’t think to return. He wasn’t prepared to engage in that fishing expedition, he said, if not with dignity, then certainly quite quietly. Hard to say what that even means, unless he was throwing the net of human interaction so wide – you want to talk about holidays? Here’s something a bit like a holiday, fishing! – that it had become surreal. The only real gotcha moment came very early on; the chair quoted a risk report dated 22 July 2021, warning of the Taliban’s rapid return to power, and Raab was surprised to learn that it was from his own department. But it engendered nothing, no disquiet, no visible unease. Raab strives for a new kind of political encounter, call it drone-warfare.