?The Foreign Secretary will appear during an extraordinary session from 2pm.

??Tom Tugendhat, the committee chairman, bemoaned the fact that he has "sadly only granted us an hour, which I don't think is particularly long, given the scale of the crisis"https://t.co/YUZzxXHCVb

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) September 1, 2021

Ministers in trouble have always been a great source of profit and comment in the history of PB. So Dominic Raab’s appearance today (for an hour) at 2pm before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee gives him an opportunity to recover his position or make it much worse. The indications are he is likely to throw his colleagues at the Ministry of Defence and Home Office under the bridge something he has started to do with his comments in the few days. The Times report

The Whitehall blame game continued today after the foreign secretary suggested that military intelligence failures were responsible for the West’s humiliation in Afghanistan.

Dominic Raab seemed to criticise the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office and to question the entire basis of Britain’s 20-year campaign.

He said military intelligence about the speed of the Taliban takeover was “clearly wrong” and that Britain had not been “realistic” about its ability to nation-build in Afghanistan.

Government sources accused Raab of trying to “throw the MoD under a bus” and said he was “just plain wrong”. They said intelligence mistakenly predicting a gradual takeover of Kabul had been based on input from MI6, GCHQ and the Ministry of Defence. A senior Foreign Office source insisted that Raab had been talking about the intelligence more broadly and denied that he was seeking to blame the MoD.

General Lord Dannatt, a former head of the army who was singled out for criticism by Raab, hit back at the foreign secretary over suggestions that thousands of Afghans eligible to come to the UK were left behind. Raab will be questioned this afternoon by the foreign affairs select committee about alleged failings by his department in the evacuation.

“Forty-five senior officers, including myself, wrote an open letter to the government in July to say that a large proportion of British nationals and interpreters and other locally engaged civilians were at risk from the Taliban,” Dannatt said. “We urged greater generosity and speed because time was not on our side.

“The response to that was very disappointing. As far as Dominic Raab is concerned, I shake my head because I wonder how people can go on defending the indefensible.”

The odds on Raab being next out of the cabinet are unattractive right now so I don’t advocate tipping that but what might be interesting is if Raab tries to publicly blame the MOD or Home Office. My expectation is that Priti Patel and Ben Wallace will not ignore any attempt to shift the blame to them. If Wallace was fine with publicly admitting to want to castrate/perform a penectomy on Michael Gove then he may do something similar that tries to traduce the armed forces.

If there was a bet on Raab not being Foreign Secretary this time next year I’d be very interested. Eventually the job retention scheme for poorly performing ministers like Raab and Williamson has to send soon, Boris Johnson cannot afford to keep it going much longer.

TSE