Steerpike has seen many abject appearances before select committees. There was the time Sir Philip Green told Richard Fuller to ‘stop staring’ at him after BHS went belly-up. There was Russell Brand’s cowboy-hatted testimony on drug abuse. There was even the infamous occasion when Rupert Murdoch was attacked by a pie. But few civil servants have given such a pathetic performance as Sir Philip Barton managed today before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the loss of Afghanistan.
The Foreign Office Permanent Secretary was up before a panel of seething MPs to respond to this morning’s revelations about the department’s dire response to the collapse of Kabul. To say that his appearance was a turkey shoot would be an embarrassment to turkeys, as the former mandarin was asked again and again why he refused to cut short his leave as the Taliban prepared to take the capital. In the course of this afternoon’s grilling it transpired that the £185,000-a-year official – who has a pension worth £1.7m – stayed on holiday until 26 August, some 11 days after Kabul fell. With Icarus-level hubris, Sir Philip refused to disclose where his jolly jaunt exactly was – only that it was split between the UK and abroad.
Under forceful questioning from a visibly enraged Alicia Kearns, Sir Philip admitted he now ‘regrets’ not coming back from his holiday sooner – presumably because his gold-plated career is now on the line. The brazen Barton nevertheless insisted that more people would not have been evacuated from Afghanistan if he had returned earlier from holiday – an insistence that prompted Kearns to mutter darkly: ‘he couldn’t be bothered.’
‘It is not enough to say mea culpa’ she continued ‘How in two weeks did you not think I have to go in and protect my people?’ Sir Philip only claimed that: ‘I don’t believe me being present in London would have changed the outcome – the number of people evacuated.’
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