Boris Johnson personally authorised the evacuation of 173 dogs and cats from Afghanistan, according to a newly-released email that contradicts his claim to have had no role in the episode.
The communication, which was sent by 25 August 2021 by a foreign office official at the height of the Kabul airlift, was released by the Commons foreign affairs committee on Wednesday.
In an email to the the department’s “special cases” team managing part of the evacuation, the official, whose name is redacted, says that the animal charity Nowzad has “received a lot of publicity”.
It goes on to add that “the PM has just authorised their staff and animals to be evacuated”.
Mr Johnson had previously said on 7 December last year that it was “complete nonsense” that he had intervened to have the animals evacuated and that he had “no influence on that particular case”. He added: “Nor would that be right.”
Minister Zac Goldsmith had also told the House of Lords that the prime minister’s claims were “entirely accurate” – apparently misleading parliament.
Opposition politicians queued up to accused the prime minister of having lied.
John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary, said that the prime minister had “once again” been “caught out lying about what he has been doing and deciding”.
“He should never have given priority to flying animals out of Afghanistan while Afghans who worked for our armed forces were left behind,” Mr Healey argued.
“Boris Johnson is unable to make the serious decisions that are needed, at home and for our allies abroad.
“In this case people were fleeing in terror as the Taliban took over Kabul and British Forces were putting their lives at risk, the prime minister was once again prioritising the wrong things and making the wrong calls. We need to know why the PM overruled the Defence Secretary with this decision.”
And Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesperson, said the episode illustrated that the prime minister was not “fit for office”.
“It’s not just on parties that the PM’s statements don’t stand up to scrutiny,” she said.
“This damning revelation shows that Boris Johnson has once again repeatedly lied to the British people. The Prime Minister claimed that he didn’t intervene to authorise the evacuation of Nowzad animals and staff from Kabul. Now it turns out he did.
“Boris Johnson’s house of cards continues to come tumbling down. He must immediately make a public statement to correct the record and for once tell the truth. This is not a man who is fit for office. He is dragging our nation’s reputation into the gutter with him and should resign.”
The government has been criticised by whistleblowers and MPs for prioritising the cats and dogs amid claims that they diverted limited resources on the ground from evacuating people. The charity’s founder, former Royal Marine Pen Farthing, denies these claims.
Though the charity chartered its own plane and put the animals in the hold, civil servants and MPs with knowledge of the operation on the ground said the capacity constraint at the airport was a limited number of soldiers able to escort people into the airport.
In December whistle-blower Raphael Marshall told MPs that the Foreign Office received “an instruction from the prime minister” to use “considerable capacity” to help Farthing.
At the time, Foreign Affairs Select Committee chair Tom Tugendhat, himself a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, criticised the decision to airlift the dogs and cats.
“There’s quite a lot of space on the aeroplanes, they’re coming and going relatively easily,” he told LBC radio. “The difficulty is getting people into and out of the airport and we’ve just used a lot of troops to get in 200 dogs, meanwhile my interpreter’s family are likely to be killed.”
Mr Farthing told the BBC: “At no time did any British soldiers leave Kabul airport to get me in, I’m dumbfounded that he’s said this to Parliament.
“As a charity, how many times do we have to tell people the truth? He said the government transported our animals. We left Kabul on a privately chartered flight, there was no government involvement.”
