Officials may have 'intentionally lied' to Parliament over Boris Johnson's involvement in evacuating pet charity from Afghanistan: whistleblower

Pen Farthing, founder of British charity Nowzad, with dogs on the outside of Kabul, Afghanistan. He and the animals left in 2021.

Reuters File

• Philip Barton and Nigel Casey may have "intentionally lied" to Parliament, a whistleblower said.
• The claim related to whether Boris Johnson had intervened to help pet charity Nowzad's evacuation from Afghanistan.
• Josie Stewart, a former official, said "numerous" emails suggested he did.

Two of Boris Johnson's senior officials on Afghanistan may have "intentionally lied" to Parliament about the prime minister's involvement in evacuating staff of animal rescue charity Nowzad, a whistleblower has claimed.

Josie Stewart, head of illicit finance in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), claimed that Lord Ahmad, a Foreign Office minister, Nigel Casey, special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Philip Barton, permanent under-secretary at the FCDO misled MPs, with the latter two having done so intentionally. 

In her testimony, published on Monday by the Foreign Affairs Committee, Stewart said it was "widespread knowledge" that the decision to help his staff had come from Johnson. 

"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 acting as 'Crisis Gold', challenged," Stewart said.

"I do not find it credible that Philip Barton, or those who drafted his letter dated 17 January 2022, would not have been aware of this," she said.

"I cannot fathom why either Philip Barton or Nigel Casey would have intentionally lied to the committee, but I believe that they must have done so both in the letter dated 17 January and in the oral testimony given on 25 January."

In January Casey told the Foreign Affairs Committee that he looked through his emails and "couldn't find any which referred to any prime ministerial intervention on the subject of Nowzad". He added: "If you have something that shows otherwise, I'd be very interested to see it."

After the committee released emails showing precisely that, Barton was forced into an apology, in which he said MPs were given "inadvertently inaccurate answers."

Stewart argued this could not have been accidental. 

"I have tried to imagine but cannot conceive of any way this could have been an honest mistake," she said. "Nigel Casey explicitly testified that he had searched his emails and found nothing of relevance, yet when I searched my emails for "PM"and "Nowzad" I found more than one email referencing "the PM's decision on Nowzad" and with Nigel Casey in copy. 

"So the only possible explanations are that a) Nigel Casey had deleted his emails (which everyone who had worked on the Afghanistan crisis had been ordered by Diptel not to do); b) he did not know how to use the "CTRL-F" function in Outlook, or searched for something other than "PM" and "Nowzad"; c) he found the emails but somehow concluded they were not relevant, despite mentioning 'the PM's decision on Nowzad'; or d) he was lying."

Dominic Dyer, an animal rights activist who campaigned to help Pen Farthing's charity make it out of Afghanistan, told Insider: "I am pleased to see another witness back up what I have been saying since August 2021 that the Prime Minister played a key role in supporting and authorising the Nowzad evacuation.

"His attempts to say otherwise, along with ministers and senior civil servants go right to the heart of trust and integrity in government and the senior civil service."

Groundhog Day

More generally Stewart's testimony corroborates much of what a more junior FCDO official, Raphael Marshall, said last year. His account characterised the Foreign Office as chaotic and ill-prepared for the Taliban takeover.

Stewart said there was "no meaningful attempt" to create a prioritisation list, saying it was "based on who happened to open or forward which random email". 

The lack of structure led to duplication and matters being missed, she claimed, comparing the situation to the movie "Groundhog Day".

She said: "I believe an appropriately functional administration could reasonably have been expected to anticipate, to clarify precisely to whom Ministers felt we owed a duty of care, and to prepare in advance a robust process for identifying and prioritising these people. 

"This did not happen, and this manifest failure led to confusion, impossible demands on the crisis team, and compounded human tragedy in Kabul."

Stewart also blamed pressure from MPs, which meant "most of the focus of the Special Cases team was on tracking down correspondence or data on individuals with connections, when it could otherwise have been spent identifying and ensuring we helped the most vulnerable people".

The "only urgency" in dealing with correspondence was after former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab promised that every MP would receive a reply by September 6, Stewart said.

This lead to the relevant teams being "bolstered" so that every email could be opened and a "generic response" issued. 

However, "this was purely in order to enable the Foreign Secretary to say that all emails from MPs had been read…. The only urgent requirement was to manage the political fallout and to appear to MPs as if something was being done – not to actually manage, understand and act on correspondence," Stewart said. 

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