[ad_1]
Boris Johnson personally authorised the evacuation of 173 dogs and cats from Afghanistan, according to a newly-released email that contradicts his claim to have had no role in the episode.
The communication, which was sent by 25 August 2021 by a foreign office official at the height of the Kabul airlift, was released by the Commons foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.
In an email to the the department’s “special cases” team managing part of the evacuation, the official, whose name is redacted, says that the animal charity Nowzad has “received a lot of publicity”.
It goes on to add that “the PM has just authorised their staff and animals to be evacuated”.
Mr Johnson had previously said on 7 December last year that it was “complete nonsense” that he had intervened to have the animals evacuated and that he had “no influence on that particular case”. He added: “Nor would that be right.”
Minister Zac Goldsmith had also told the House of Lords that the prime minister’s claims were “entirely accurate” – apparently misleading parliament.
Opposition politicians queued up to accused the prime minister of having lied. John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, said that the prime minister had “once again” been “caught out lying about what he has been doing and deciding”.
“He should never have given priority to flying animals out of Afghanistan while Afghans who worked for our armed forces were left behind,” Mr Healey argued.
“Boris Johnson is unable to make the serious decisions that are needed, at home and for our allies abroad.
“In this case people were fleeing in terror as the Taliban took over Kabul and British Forces were putting their lives at risk, the prime minister was once again prioritising the wrong things and making the wrong calls. We need to know why the PM overruled the Defence Secretary with this decision.”
And Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesperson, said the episode illustrated that the prime minister was not “fit for office”.
“It’s not just on parties that the PM’s statements don’t stand up to scrutiny,” she said.
“This damning revelation shows that Boris Johnson has once again repeatedly lied to the British people. The Prime Minister claimed that he didn’t intervene to authorise the evacuation of Nowzad animals and staff from Kabul. Now it turns out he did.
“Boris Johnson’s house of cards continues to come tumbling down. He must immediately make a public statement to correct the record and for once tell the truth. This is not a man who is fit for office. He is dragging our nation’s reputation into the gutter with him and should resign.”
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who objected to the move at the time, said the prime minister should come to the Commons and answer questions about the episode.
“Either a government minister in the Foreign Office has lied, or the prime minister has lied,” Mr Bryant, chair of the Commons standards committee, told Sky News.
“I merely note that the prime minister himself said in PMQs that the ministerial code applies to him. And if somebody has lied then the do need to resign … The prime minister should come to the House tomorrow and answer questions on it.”
Mr Bryant also raised a point of order in the Commons about the matter after Prime Minister’s Questions.
The Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said that ministers “are encouraged to correct inadvertently incorrect statements made to the House as quickly as possible if such a mistake has occurred”.
The Scottish National Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson Alyn Smith said Boris Johnson was “stumbling from one scandal to the next”.
“How many revelations can we have that contradict the Prime Minister’s stated position before we discount every word he says?” he said.
“The leaked redacted excerpts from these emails seem to give the lie to Mr Johnson’s denial of any personal intervention in getting cats and dogs in Afghanistan to safety before people. If true, this raises serious questions for the UK government.”
Mr Smith added that there were “countless cases of people in Afghanistan, including those who helped UK Armed Forces and those at real risk of Taliban reprisals, being left behind”. The SNP politician said the PM’s claim to have been “prioritising the evacuation of people” was now “deeply questionable”.
Asked about the claims on Wednesday, the prime minister’s official spokesman said: “It remains the case that the PM didn’t instruct officials to take any particular course of action.”
A No 10 spokesperson added: “The Prime Minister had no role in authorising individual evacuations from Afghanistan during Op PITTING, including Nowzad staff and animals.
“At no point did the prime minister instruct staff to take any particular course of action on Nowzad.”
Lord Goldsmith said in a statement released on Wednesday afternoon: “I did not authorise and do not support anything that would have put animals’ lives ahead of peoples’. My position, which I made clear publicly, was that the UK should prioritise evacuating people. I never discussed the Nowzad charity or their efforts to evacuate animals with the prime minister.”
The government has been criticised by whistleblowers and MPs for prioritising the cats and dogs amid claims that they diverted limited resources on the ground from evacuating people. The charity’s founder, former Royal Marine Pen Farthing, denies these claims.
Though the charity chartered its own plane and put the animals in the hold, civil servants and MPs with knowledge of the operation on the ground said the capacity constraint at the airport was a limited number of soldiers able to escort people into the airport.
In December whistle-blower Raphael Marshall told MPs that the Foreign Office received “an instruction from the prime minister” to use “considerable capacity” to help Farthing.
At the time, Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Tom Tugendhat, himself a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, criticised the decision to airlift the dogs and cats.
“There’s quite a lot of space on the aeroplanes, they’re coming and going relatively easily,” he told LBC radio. “The difficulty is getting people into and out of the airport and we’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs, meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.”
Mr Farthing told the BBC: “At no time did any British soldiers leave Kabul airport to get me in, I’m dumbfounded that he’s said this to Parliament.
UK news in pictures
Show all 50
“As a charity, how many times do we have to tell people the truth? He said the government transported our animals. We left Kabul on a privately chartered flight, there was no government involvement.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who was in charge at the time of the operation, said in a statement that “at no point” was he directed by the prime minister to “evacuate Pen Farthing, his workforce or his pets” from Afghanistan.
In a statement, Mr Wallace said: “I have seen the reports of emails concerning Pen Farthing and the pet evacuation.
“The evacuation of Kabul under Operation Pitting was run under my authority and delivered by the UK military through the Chief of Joint Operations.
“At no point were he or I directed by the Prime Minister to evacuate Pen Farthing, his workforce or his pets.
“As I made clear at the time, we were not going to put pets before people and as the actions showed, Pen Farthing left last and his workforce had to leave after the evacuation was concluded via other means.
“The evacuation was a Ministry of Defence led operation, supported by application processing by the Home Office and FCDO.”
He said it was “ludicrous” to believe that the official, in Lord Goldsmith’s private office, “had any authority or responsibility in the running of the evacuation”.
But Mr Wallace added: “I am however aware of false claims made throughout by Nowzad that led to considerable distress and distraction to those trying to save lives in very difficult circumstances.”
[ad_2]
Source link