![]() The crisis centre received thousands of emails from desperate Afghans asking for help which sat unopened until pressure from MPs led to Raab promising in the House of Commons that they would all be read by a certain date. “Then they thought: ‘Well, people do care and we had better do something about it.’ So it was a misjudgment politically. “The only reason it came into life during the crisis was because government was surprised to learn that the British people did actually care and did feel that we owed something to those people. “There was no policy because we didn’t intend to do it at all,” she said. She cited the government’s failure to have a plan for evacuating Afghan nationals, such as translators or contractors, who had helped the British but weren’t eligible for the existing Afghan relocations and assistance policy (ARAP) scheme because they didn’t work directly for the UK. “It was shocking in terms of the scale and how brazen and obvious it was to civil servants working on it.” “The almost entire objective politically was to come out of it looking OK to the UK public, rather than to save lives or fulfil a responsibility to the Afghan people,” she said. ![]() In a particularly damning claim, she suggested that the politicisation of the civil service had had a dramatic impact on the government’s handling of the Afghanistan evacuation. It risks that expertise being neutered by a slant towards focusing on things that look good rather than achieving impact.” The civil service is supposed to bring expertise in how to get things done. “It threatens the impartiality of the civil service. Those who resisted either found themselves buried somewhere or looking for jobs elsewhere. “Essentially people who said ‘yes’ and went along with it and bought into this shift in culture and approach were those whose careers went well. It was almost as if their first loyalty to their political leaders rather than to the public,” she said. “I increasingly saw senior officials interpreting their role as doing what ministers say and providing protections to ministers. Stewart, 42, who now works for the organisation Transparency International, claimed that the civil service had been dangerously politicised since the Boris Johnson era and accused the cabinet secretary, Simon Case, of failing to stand up for officials. Is what they’re going to do likely to be legally protected or not? If they don’t know then I’m not sure how meaningful the fact the law exists is,” she said. “If the law is not tested and used then I don’t know how much it actually means as potential whistleblowers don’t know which side of the line it is going to fall. ![]() Her case, which gets its final hearing in September this year, will establish a precedent for how the courts handle similar ones in future, clarifying whether whistleblowers can avoid dismissal if they have disclosed information in “exceptionally serious circumstances” and it is therefore viewed as “reasonable” to have done so. She suggested that ministers had not expected the public to care about evacuating locals who had helped the British. Stewart, who worked for the FCDO for seven years, including two at the British embassy in Kabul, volunteered to work in the Whitehall crisis centre when the Taliban took over. He was criticised for failing to return home from holiday in August 2021 when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. Her intervention will increase the pressure on Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary at the time, who is currently fighting for his political career over bullying allegations, which he has denied. In her first interview since she lost her job, she said that the government’s Afghan withdrawal strategy had been shaped by political concerns back home, with ministers more focused on media coverage and “the political fallout” than saving lives. Stewart, who was head of illicit finance at the department, is challenging her dismissal with the Public Interest Disclosure Act after she was sacked for giving an anonymous interview to the BBC about the government’s handling of the chaotic Afghan withdrawal. The former senior official at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is now taking the government to court to test legal protections for whistleblowers amid concerns they are not sufficient to protect civil servants who share sensitive information in the public interest. ![]()
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