A Foreign Office civil servant felt “morally compelled” to speak to the media about the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan after the government presented a “dishonest account” of what happened, an employment tribunal has heard.
Josie Stewart was sacked by the Foreign Office (FCDO) after blowing the whistle on the failures of the withdrawal from Kabul and disclosing emails indicating Boris Johnson’s involvement in an “outrageous” decision to prioritise the evacuation of staff from the animal charity Nowzad, despite his denials.
Her claim for unfair dismissal on the grounds that her whistleblowing was protected under the Employment Rights Act 1996 began on Thursday at the central London employment tribunal.
Stewart was “horrified” by the chaos and dysfunction at the Whitehall crisis centre where she had volunteered to work when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, the tribunal was told.
She believed “the government’s mismanagement of the crisis caused huge amounts of avoidable suffering in Afghanistan and that it had probably cost lives”.
Her lawyers’ opening arguments also said Stewart and others “believed that, at a moment of very high stakes, the UK government failed badly, and that political and civil service leaders sought to ‘cover up’ failures, presenting a misleading and in some instances even dishonest account to the public”.
She agreed to speak anonymously to the BBC about these failures after a junior civil servant, Raphael Marshall, gave damning evidence to a committee of MPs about the withdrawal from Afghanistan and was then subjected to attempts to discredit him, the tribunal was told.
She also leaked emails to the BBC after Johnson had described as “complete nonsense” claims that he had been involved in the decision to evacuate Nowzad staff and animals, the court was told. The emails “indicated, contrary to the prime minister’s claim, that No 10 had been involved in the decisions relating to Nowzad”, the submission said.
It added: “[Stewart] had viewed numerous emails which appeared to confirm the PM’s involvement in the Nowzad decision and it was impossible to reconcile those emails with the PM’s public denial of any involvement.” Her lawyers argued that Stewart was acting in the public interest.
She was suspended and then sacked after a BBC reporter tweeted the emails and “unintentionally” disclosed Stewart’s identity. The case will decide the extent of the rights of civil servants to make public interest disclosures to the press.
In her witness statement, Stewart said she knew she was unauthorised to speak to the media but felt she had been put in an impossible position. “Doing so [speaking to the media] was less wrong than my alternatives,” her statement said. Her lawyers described Stewart as “a committed and public-spirited person who was deeply troubled by what she observed in the crisis centre, and by subsequent portrayals of what had happened, and who in the end felt morally compelled to speak out”.
She was dismissed without any allowance for statutory whistleblowing protection, the submission said.
Lawyers for the FCDO had previously challenged the admissibility of some of Stewart’s evidence on the grounds that including parts of her witness testimony would breach principles of parliamentary privilege.
In November, the employment tribunal decided to allow some of the whistleblower’s contested evidence, but redacted some elements.
An FCDO spokesperson said: “The 2021 Afghanistan response was the biggest mission of its kind in generations and the second largest evacuation carried out by any country – and we are proud of our staff who worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people within a fortnight.
“We have learned lessons from the evacuation and have seen the benefits of this work in our response to the Sudan and Niger evacuations, as well as in our response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing situation in the Middle East.
“We have continued to provide assistance to those in Afghanistan, including bringing thousands more people to safety. We cannot comment further while legal proceedings are ongoing.”
The tribunal will continue until 20 May.
