Raab ‘refused Downing St order to come home from Crete holiday’
Sources claim Minister ignored No 10’s demand, but allies say Boris gave him nod to stay in Greece
FOREIGN Secretary Dominic Raab was plunged into a fresh row over his holiday last night after sources claimed that he had refused an order by No10 to return from the Mediterranean to deal with the Afghanistan crisis.
Sources said that Mr Raab had been told by a senior Downing Street official on Friday, August 13, that he should return to London immediately as the situation in Kabul deteriorated, and that there had been ‘much gnashing of teeth’ when he delayed his homecoming until the early hours of Monday.
The claim is strongly denied by friends of Mr Raab, who insist that he was assured by Boris Johnson that he could stay with his family until the end of the weekend.
The Cabinet Minister has faced a torrent of criticism for staying on holiday with his wife and two children as Kabul fell into the extremists’ hands, and for omitting to call the Afghan foreign minister to seek help for translators stranded in the country.
Mr Raab admits that he had been advised to contact the crumbling Afghan administration last Friday, but said the call was ‘delegated to a minister of state because I was prioritising security and capacity at the airport’. The conversation did not happen because of the ‘deteriorating situation’, he said.
The saga has led to sniping at Mr Raab from within his own party and calls from Labour for him to resign, although Mr Johnson has said that he ‘absolutely’ has full confidence in his Foreign Secretary.
It has, however, undoubtedly strained relations between No10 and the Foreign Office. A source said: ‘There is no doubt that Raab was told to come back on that Friday. There was then a significant amount of surprise when he appeared on the Cobra [the Government’s national crisis meeting] on the Sunday down the line from Crete. He must have nobbled Boris and asked for permission to finish his holiday.’
Last night, Mr Raab told The Mail on Sunday that he had enjoyed a ‘wave of support’, and denied that there was pressure from within his party to resign.
He said: ‘I’ve not heard any of my Conservative colleagues call for
‘He nobbled Boris and asked to finish his break’
me to resign, but I have had a wave of support. There is no doubt that, like in all countries, there is a measure of surprise at the rapidity of the Taliban takeover.
‘But as Foreign Secretary travelling around the world, whether I am on leave or I’m travelling for work purposes, I am always set up to be able to grip things.’
He added: ‘I was on all the Cobra calls – I didn’t miss one. I was engaged in several meetings every day with my director general running the emergency response. And I was speaking to our international partners.’
A close ally of Mr Raab launched a more detailed rebuttal of the allegations against him, and insisted that No10 had not ‘ordered’ him to return on August 13.
The ally said: ‘The suggestion was that he should make plans to come back. They said that if things got worse then he needed to be ready to come back at a moment’s notice. He then talked it through with the PM and it was agreed that he would came back on Sunday.’
So why didn’t he just fly back? ‘The challenge was that he had a bunch of meetings, and it was quite difficult to be out of action for six hours while he was travelling. He would probably have come back earlier on the Sunday if he didn’t have to wait for the Cobra.’
The ally strongly denied reports that Mr Raab had spent most of last Sunday on the beach. ‘That is just not true. He based his family on the beach in a gazebo precisely so that he could go back and work at the hotel, while he checked in on them every now and again. When he got ten minutes he went for a walk down the beach with his boy.
‘He wasn’t just lounging around. If you look at what he had to do on the Sunday – getting the briefings, reading through them, holding two meetings with the response team, joining a Cobra and calling the Pakistani Foreign Minister – it can’t be true.
‘A modern Foreign Secretary has always got the ability to work. He has never had a holiday that hasn’t been interrupted, so he is just ready for it, although he accepts that this was of a different order and a different scale.’
The Mail on Sunday can reveal more details of the luxurious £1,200-a-night apartment in which Mr Raab and his family stayed at the exclusive five-star Amirandes resort in Crete.
His Brazilian-born wife Erika Rey booked the ground-floor suite in her name. It has a king-size bed and looks on to a private garden fringed by palm trees, and has its own pool. The suite is a stone’s throw from a manicured beach where it is believed Mr Raab rented a jet-ski during his stay. The resort, said to be ‘inspired by the palaces of Minoan kings’, has an Olympicsized seawater pool, three floodlit tennis courts, a playground and several boutiques. Other guests during Mr Raab’s stay included millionaire tycoons and the Game Of Thrones actor Iain Glen. The row has led to speculation that Mr Raab will be moved in the next reshuffle, possibly replacing Robert Buckland as Justice Secretary.
Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove is among those tipped to replace Mr Raab. Downing Street declined to comment last night.