Afghanistan crisis: Did Dominic Raab fly home from holiday in Crete for the sake of appearances? – Scotsman comment

If you are the British Foreign Secretary, it’s not a good look to be relaxing on a beach holiday on the same day as one of the biggest crises in global affairs reaches its climax.

Dominic Raab is back in London to help deal with the Afghanistan crisis following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

So Dominic Raab has been scrambling to explain why he was sunning himself in Crete on Sunday, when Taliban fighters entered Kabul, sparking a flood of refugees desperate to escape this brutal regime and its penchant for summary executions, torture and revenge.

Raab’s predicament prompted former Labour Foreign Office minister Jim Murphy to recall, perhaps ruefully, that he was just “six hours into my holiday in Spain when Russia and Georgia’s 2008 war began”. “Gordon Brown rightly had me back at my desk that same day,” he added.

However, it is not entirely unknown for civil servants to suggest departments are more effective when the Secretary is away and those with more expertise can do their jobs without sometimes amateurish interference.

Whether Raab’s hands-on leadership was missed is not entirely clear. But he cannot avoid his share of the blame that, as he said, “everyone was caught off-guard by the pace, scale of the Taliban takeover”. It is part of his job to ensure such events do not take the government by surprise.

That said, it should be an old-fashioned attitude to be overly concerned about the location of a key decision-maker because ministers should be able to take part in vital meetings remotely if the need arises.

The only place they cannot do that is where Raab was on Sunday evening – in a plane flying back from holiday for what might have been simply the sake of appearances.