Foreign Sec Raab now 19% second favourite in the next Cabinet exit betting – politicalbetting.com
Foreign Sec Raab now 19% second favourite in the next Cabinet exit betting – politicalbetting.com
As I indicated in my post yesterday I thought that Raab would survive as Foreign Sec following the revelation that he did not make phone calls to his Afghan opposite number in order to protect the Afghan interpreters at the UK’s embassy there.
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Israel: 172 killed 817 wounded 1 captured
United Kingdom: 16 killed 96 wounded
France: 10 killed 33 wounded
Kabul crisis:
US ?
UK ?
Denmark?
Germany?
Spain ?
France ?
Belgium ?
Italy ?
Netherlands ?
Norway ?
Sweden ?
Turkey ?
Ukraine ?
According to publicly available court documents, the woman received a sum “in consideration for the confidentiality obligations” she agreed with Raab and Davis.
BuzzFeed News reported on Tuesday that Raab is refusing to lift the confidentiality provisions. He strongly denies any allegations of bullying.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/maria-miller-dominic-raab-nda
Money for keeping your gob shut? Why?
All too believable, sadly for the rest of them.
https://www.google.se/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-carrie-symonds-photo-staged-lbc-interview-tory-leadership-a8973386.html?
Is that HYUFD’s baldy heid poking out?
Even better to have every seat filled but not clear it is worth delaying a flight to fill an extra seat
A separate diplomatic source also said… Raab had not spoken to any of the key UK ambassadors in the region, such as in Pakistan or Uzbekistan, or regional ambassadors in London before the weekend – even to offer moral support – and commented: “You don’t need a team of staff to do that, you just need to be a decent human being to say, ‘How are you doing? It’s going to be a tough few weeks, how can I help?’” The source added: “He has completely missed the boat on everything.”
One Tory MP said Raab’s position was untenable and that “not coming home was his biggest mistake” – he reportedly only arrived in the UK in the early hours of Monday morning, a position supported by some other backbenchers.
Other Tory MPs said Raab had been “lacklustre” and that he still had “big questions to answer about what he knew when”. One said they worried Raab’s actions played into Labour’s criticism of ministers’ incompetence, saying this was beginning to register with voters.
Margaret Beckett, who was foreign secretary under Tony Blair, said it was unheard of for a foreign secretary to refuse to make a call. “… if it is the case that the Foreign Office were asking the foreign secretary to intervene with the Afghan foreign minister, then it is one of the most extraordinary things I have ever heard, that on behalf of people to whom we owe a debt of honour, he thought it could be delegated to a junior minister,” she said.
Another critic was Maj Gen Charlie Herbert, who undertook three tours of Afghanistan and was senior Nato adviser in Kabul.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/19/dominic-raab-faces-pressure-from-opposition-and-tory-mps-to-resign
Some 15,000 U.S. citizens and residents are behind Taliban lines. There’s no easy way to get them out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-american-withdrawal-kabul-taliban-afghanistan-evacuate-iran-hostage-crisis-carter-11629303110
Dem winner 8/11
Rep winner 5/4
Pretending that a key phone call had been made, when it hadn’t, just to protect a minister is pretty poor show, even by this lot’s risible standards….
Mind you, that wager might be locked up for years.
What was in the plane’s belly?
Would have been better to delay the flight or to allow another plane to take its place?
You are behaving like one of those people who doesn’t understand the complexity of managing freight and passengers on the same railway network
In a book to be published next Tuesday, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order, British health experts at the time are described as being “oddly pessimistic about their capacity to defeat the virus”, rejecting measures such as a ban on mass gatherings.
“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors, Thomas Wright, a foreign affairs expert at the Brookings Institution, and Colin Kahl, who is now under secretary of defence for policy. “We thought they were nuts and they thought we were nuts. It turns out, in the end, we were a little more right than they were.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/19/us-trump-johnson-herd-immunity-aftershocks-book
It was a tired reaction which hadn’t been thought through fully and I was trying to defend someone who is not a moron but who said something with some merit that could have been phrased differently.
Whilst I am fed up with everyone being an “expert” on everything these days and get angry with politicians and others saying “you shouldn’t have done/said that” when they would likely have had to do the same I should not have made the point I made and how I made it and especially in light of your own history which inevitably will give you reason to be more agitated to certain events. So again I apologise for the personal and also for my own inarticulate comment - I must be a budding Nick Carter myself....
https://twitter.com/manda_m0/status/1428054565631451143?s=19
An MP's salary is £81,932
The cost of Raabs holiday £40,000!
Dominic Raab spent half his yearly salary on a one week holiday?!
Who really paid for it???? https://t.co/eeGYlWHxqW
So anyone calling for Her Majesty's First Secretary of State to resign is a remoaning communist or something. HYUFD will be along in a minute with an opinion poll to show that Raab is being backed by Tory voters and that is why Scottish independence is dead.
I would also concur that there are far too many keyboard warriors who opine on issues as if they were knowledgeable when in fact it is just political posturing and in the same circumstances they would make the same if not worse errors
I do not know but surely Raab is wealthy enough to pay for his holiday from his savings
Raab is a waste of space when at the office, he is no more useless on holiday. As if a phone call would have made any difference? He might as well have another cocktail by the pool.
The idea of Patrick Harvie being in charge of anything more serious than getting dressed in the morning is just mind blowing.
And here we are with perhaps 3k Brits, 15k Americans and an unknown number of others from other Western countries, their lives in the hands of a regime far more barbaric and unpredictable than Hezbollah.
Yokel tells that some security firms are advising clients to stay put for now. Stay put for what exactly? Personally I’d take my chances now than after 31 Aug when all bets are off to Taliban behaviour.
One gets the feeling that the media are under direction not to report just how dire this situation really is. The US system is different of course but I reckon the chances of the British government falling over this are not inconsiderable, especially if it’s true that Macron and Merkel largely got their people out ahead of time.
No surprises there!
If it is legit, good for him. Nonetheless it doesn't detract from the no-show phonecall.
Ministers and officials have been told that the last evacuation flight could leave Kabul airport in just 5 days time
Plans for an ‘orderly withdrawal’ mean the last flight could go on August 24
Govt source emphasises no decision made
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/some-wont-make-it-out-admits-minister-amid-evacuation-chaos-dvfvtdd32
People can understand the idea of not wanting to break off a holiday. Upsetting the rest of the family. The need for a break, the money, etc etc etc. But when the holiday costs 40 large, that is different because who spends that on a holiday?
All of the basic sympathy in my last paragraph gone in an instant. Raaaaaaaab is now an aloof toff spending stupid money on a holiday to stick it to the plebs how much better he is than us. This is going to get worse and worse. Until he has to deploy the get out of the sack card,
Tell Boris that he couldn't make the call as he was accidentally stuck in a fridge on live TV.
I also think that it is important that politicians have some sort of normal in their lives and are able to spend time with their families. People who are willing to expose themselves in the way politicians have to are weird enough in the first place and we do not want to encourage them to get any weirder. It really doesn't say much for the FO if it cannot operate without the FS for a week when other ministers are available.
The backlash he is suffering is a consequence of this being an undoubted humiliation both in the total failure of the mission and the way in which the outcome was dumped on us by the US without consultation. That is fair enough, this has been a disastrous episode, but the focus on the trivia of this call and his week off is typical of the way that our politics is distorted.
The idea that this phone call to an Aghan government totally focused on finding the first plane out, ideally with some loot, would have made any difference whatsoever is risible. Where there were failures is to assess the situation on the ground, realise that things could collapse quickly, making contingency plans for that scenario and getting all non essential personnel out of the country. We dragged our feet on the interpreters for far too long and now it is beyond our power. This is a significant failure of government but we focus on the trivia.
I have this mental image of Rik Mayall as Raab remonstrating that he is far too important to be troubled on his holiday. "Let a minion make the call!"
It was financed out of my investments and had nothing to do with my annual income
The idea you have to be poor to be a politician is nonsense as is the idea Raab's missed phone call had any effect on the chaos in Kabul
However, Raab is not the most inspiring of politicians and if it is true he went on holiday and made it clear he was not to be disturbed, then as Foreign Secretary that is absurd and no doubt in time he will be moved out of his role
Though with Boris who knows when as he still has Williamson, Patel and Jenrick in his cabinet
Former Sheffield Hallam MP Jared O'Mara has been charged with seven counts of fraud. South Yorkshire Police said the charges related to a number of alleged fraudulent expenses claims.
Mr O'Mara, 39, is charged alongside former aide Gareth Arnold, who faces six counts of fraud, and a third man, John Woodliff, who faces a single charge under the Proceeds of Crime Act. They will appear before magistrates in Sheffield on 24 September.
The offences are said to have occurred between October 2018 and February 2020. The force said the charges brought against Mr O'Mara, of Walker Close, Sheffield, related to expenses claims submitted to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
"The charge relates to an allegation he made fraudulent invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority jointly with Gareth Arnold, who is also charged with six counts of the same offence."
Very depressing.
Hope I am wrong.
1. The din for Raab's head will become deafening
2. Johnson will publicly back him
3. Raab will resign
4. Johnson will say he was right to sack him
5. The Tory vote share will recover
Yes its stupid. But you get what you vote for. And right now in England people like being openly lied to. As Johnson did when he claimed to have sacked Hancock who resigned after Johnson backed him.
Indeed, I suspect Biden will find it very difficult in the next few weeks just to fly out of Kabul with his troops leaving 15,000 US citizens behind
It was also admitted US jets are overflying Kabul in close protection
No excuses. Should he fall? That is up to Johnson.
The point is that the missing phone call is a symptom of an FS intent on enjoying his luxury holiday and not focused on the tragic crisis unfolding overseas on his watch.
Also note the dates - he left Parliament in 2019 (indeed in practice years earlier) yet was still making claims in Feb 2020
The remarks, planned for 1 p.m.,
NYTimes
“Where have they been for the past 18 months? We knew this day was coming”. Says the foreign secretary had numerous G7 and NATO meetings in which would have been discussed.
https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1428615934097379333
"Let me tell you, Mr. Friedman, more than 70 percent of Afghanistan’s population is under 25 years old. Most of them know nothing about the Taliban and have never heard of Mullah Omar — just like all those 20-somethings in Iran who have never heard of the shah and give Iran’s Islamic rulers grief every day. They have been raised in a different Afghanistan, in a different age, and they will not easily give up the freedoms they enjoyed these past 20 years, even if the country was a mess.
Tribes in this part of the world, Mr. Friedman, have a saying: Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my brother and my cousin against the outsider."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/afghanistan-us-taliban.html
@larisamlbrown reveals this morning that *just 10* FCDO and Border Force staff are in Kabul processing visa applications
They only arrived on Tuesday night
For several days only foreign office official/ diplomat at airport was the ambassador
https://twitter.com/larisamlbrown/status/1428478067526225923
Surely it's Somebody's Law of the Internet that there's nothing so bad that somebody won't defend it online.
In other news, ye cannae have a party withoot Mikey Gove.
https://coronavirus.bg/
Multiply numbers by ten for UK equivalents.
https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/the-union-is-more-than-a-dividend
Plenty of people in the services have had holidays and other events ruined at minimal notice for far less pressing matters...
That situation is not going to improve with those baying for Raab's head. Politics has become a play thing of (often ill-informed) gobshites on social media. Usually by those who don't put their name forward to the electorate (probably because they know they would have no chance of getting elected if they did...).