A second whistleblower has gone public to say it was “widespread knowledge” in government that Boris Johnson ordered the prioritisation of an animal charity based in Afghanistan for evacuation during the Taliban takeover last summer.
Josie Stewart, who worked in the Foreign Office for seven years, including a stint in the Kabul embassy, suggested senior civil servants in the department had lied to cover up the embarrassing episode.
She told parliament’s foreign affairs select committee that the direction from the prime minister was evidenced in multiple messages on Teams, on emails, and in conversations around the crisis centre, which was set up to try to help the tens of thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee.
Johnson has denied that he had anything to do with the decision for the animal charity, Nowzad, to be allowed to evacuate staff and animals through Kabul airport.
But after a Foreign Office insider came forward in December to reveal the chaos and confusion at the heart of the crisis response, Stewart, who worked on the evacuation, corroborated the claims by revealing further “systemic failures”.
She told MPs that the decision to approve Nowzad’s staff for evacuation “was not in line with policy, as there was no reason to believe these people should be prioritised under the agreed criteria”.
“It was widespread ‘knowledge’ in the FCDO crisis centre that the decision on Nowzad’s Afghan staff came from the prime minister,” Stewart said in newly released testimony.
“I saw messages to this effect on Microsoft Teams, I heard it discussed in the crisis centre including by senior civil servants, and I was copied on numerous emails which clearly suggested this and which no one, including Nigel Casey [the government’s special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan] acting as ‘Crisis Gold’, challenged.”
In the aftermath of the evacuation, the Foreign Office’s permanent secretary, Philip Barton, claimed civil servants had included Nowzad in the “potential cohorts to be considered for evacuation”.
Stewart said: “While factually accurate, from what I heard and saw, Nowzad staff were included as a late addition only in response to this ‘PM decision’. This occurred against the previous judgment of officials.”
She told the committee she was sent an email from Casey that said the national security adviser was speaking to No 10 about the possibility of evacuating Nowzad.
Stewart told the committee it appeared Barton and Casey may have “intentionally lied”. After Casey claimed he had searched his emails and found nothing of relevance to the issue, Stewart suggested he had either not looked for the simple terms “PM” and “Nowzad”, deleted messages or found the correspondence but decided they were unimportant.
Casey blamed the rumour about Johnson ordering Nowzad’s evacuation on a senior official, whom he claimed mistakenly believed that signoff by the national security adviser meant it had come from No 10.
“That was based on an assumption which should not have been made - but was,” Casey said. “It was made in good faith, and I don’t want to attribute any blame.”
Casey admitted the Nowzad evacuation “took up far more official time than it deserved to”, adding: “The people involved from the organisation … behaved pretty disgracefully in their lobbying.”
After Stewart admitted she was prepared to lose her job to call out senior managers for being more “focused on managing reputational risk and political fallout rather than the actual crisis and associated human tragedy”, Barton refused to comment on whether she would be sacked.
David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, said the revelation was “further confirmation that the prime minister put the lives of animals ahead of humans on a personal whim and then lied about doing so”.
The Lib Dems also called for a public inquiry into Johnson’s interventions on behalf of Nowzad.
A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said all its evidence submitted to the committee was provided “in good faith, on the basis of the evidence available to us at the time”.
They added: “We are rightly proud of our staff who worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight … As is the case after all crises, the FCDO is committed to learning lessons and using its experience to improve the way the organisation responds to crisis overseas. We have incorporated many of the lessons into our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Dominic Dyer, an animal rights activist with ties to Nowzad, tweeted on Monday that Johnson “did intervene directly to get Nowzad staff and families on evacuation list”.
