The blame game from the Afghan data leak disaster was in full flow at Westminster on Wednesday.
The charge list is horrific: thousands of lives at risk from the Taliban in Afghanistan, a country the West already abandoned to medieval misogynists. Then there’s the gross incompetence of a British civil servant, a profligate £6bn bill for the taxpayer, and a seemingly complicit unconstitutional cover-up by both the Conservatives and the Labour Party.
During an attempt to authenticate the identities of former members of the Triples – elite Afghan units trained and funded by the UK and who had supported British forces – a soldier unintentionally disseminated a comprehensive database containing 19,000 names, addresses, and telephone numbers to Afghans, putting them at fatal risk from the Taliban.
That soldier has been moved but not fired, according to current Defence Secretary John Healey, who has also offered a “sincere apology” to those affected by the leak. Meanwhile, his predecessor, former Tory defence secretary Ben Wallace, has said he makes “no apology” for halting reporting of the data breach, but had no intention that the superinjunction that prevented reporting of the case should last so long.
Recriminations are already under way; Sir Keir Starmer used his first intervention at Prime Minister’s Questions to argue Conservative ex-ministers “have serious questions to answer”. The Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said Parliament must learn lessons from whether MPs could have scrutinised the affair even if the press was prevented from covering it, as their right to Parliamentary privilege appears to have been suspended. Both the Defence and Intelligence and Security Committees are now expected to conduct investigations.
But to what end? Healey inherited the mess. Ex-minister Wallace isn’t even in Parliament anymore, having taken up a job advising Saudi Arabia on reform, governance and security. At least he appeared on the airwaves on Wednesday to defend his decision-making.
Unless senior civil servants are called before Parliament’s committees, perhaps we will never know why earlier data breaches – which ministers and officials had promised to fix – still allowed such a sensitive email past Ministry of Defence firewalls. The Liberal Democrats called for a full public inquiry.But even if we get public answers, anyone taking responsibility is highly unlikely. Honourable resignations are vanishingly rare.
The most famous case of political harakiri was in 1982. Following the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, Richard Luce, then minister for state for foreign affairs, went to see Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington to resign from his post, but Carrington himself insisted on carrying the can with him. In more recent times, Robin Cook resigned from the cabinet over the Iraq War in a statement that earned him a standing ovation in the House of Commons.
Seven years on from resigning the post of Conservative Home Secretary, Amber Rudd is now an adviser to several multinational companies. Yet even now when she meets new people, some tell her she was last minister to honourably resign. In 2018 she quit after misleading Parliament over whether she knew about targets to remove illegal immigrants in the Windrush scandal after being wrongly briefed by her civil servants.
“People came back to me afterwards and some said you should have resigned, and others said you shouldn’t. But for me, when you know, you know; it wasn’t a calculation. The information kept on changing, civil servants kept changing the story, and so I couldn’t go back in the House of Commons and do it again,” Rudd told The i Paper.
“The question over every case is whether the cock-up is by the politician or the civil service. If the policy goes wrong, it’s the fault of the politician; if it’s the implementation, it’s the fault of the civil service,” she said. “In this case about the Afghans, I don’t think this is for the politicians to carry; it’s for the civil servants. After I resigned over Windrush, there were no fall guys at the civil service. It’s part of the problem of the civil service: they close ranks to look after each other. They need some accountability.”
But there are plenty of cases where ministers have remained in post when history suggests they shouldn’t. In 1983, Jim Prior remained Northern Ireland Secretary despite 38 IRA fighters breaking out of prison on his watch, and 10 years later, on Black Wednesday, then Chancellor Norman Lamont refused to quit after his decisions cost the country £3bn in one day.
“The last time a minister truly took the blame for their underlings’ errors was in 1954, when Sir Thomas Dugdale sacrificed himself in the convoluted Crichel Down Affair, in which the government was deemed to have broken its promise in a land dispute. Hailed at the time as the definitive example of individual responsibility, it appears, with hindsight, to have been an isolated incident,” according to Theo Barclay, author of Fighters and Quitters: Great Political Resignations.
“Lord Carrington and Amber Rudd bear some responsibility for what happened on their respective watches. But the key point is this all comes down to politics. A minister who has the support of the prime minister is going nowhere. Equally, it seems wrong to pin the blame on the faceless civil service – if an error has been made and the minister isn’t responsible, then we ought to know who was,” Barclay told The i Paper.
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There is also a danger of viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles. Most of those who quit their government jobs don’t go out in a blaze of noble glory; they vanish for more prosaic reasons, according to Tim Durrant, programme director at the Institute for Government think-tank.
“The number of resignations has increased under recent prime ministers – a year in, Starmer has seen eight ministers resign. At this point in a premiership, that’s the joint highest with former Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak,” Durrant told The i Paper.
“But most resignations are because of either individual scandals or disagreement over policy decisions, rather than accountability over things going wrong. While there are some notable examples in the past, like Amber Rudd over Windrush or Lord Carrington during the Falklands War, there was never a golden age.”
He added: “Most ministerial resignations since Margaret Thatcher have been because of personal misconduct, policy disagreements, or personal reasons rather than them holding their hands up and saying they made a mistake.”
No wonder just 12 per cent of voters trust government to put the interests of the nation above those of their own party – a record low – according to the National Centre for Social Research which reported its annual findings last month.
On the Afghan debacle, you’d think several senior heads would roll. But in modern Britain, the age of falling honourably on your sword no longer exists, if it ever did at all. The public will likely greet this latest complex narrative with weary disillusionment.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence believes 600 Afghan soldiers included in the leak, plus 1,800 of their family members, are still in Afghanistan. No resignation will help them now.
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