Boris Johnson has dismissed new evidence that he ordered the controversial evacuation of dogs and cats from Afghanistan as “total rhubarb”.
Internal emails released to the public this week show officials saying the prime minister has “authorised” resources be directed to getting the animals out of the country.
The email contradicted Mr Johnson’s previous claims he had ordered the evacuation. He had branded the claims “complete nonsense” and said it would have been wrong for him to have intervened.
But despite the new evidence the PM doubled down on Thursday when asked about the episode, telling reporters: “No, that is… this whole thing is total rhubarb.”
On a visit to North Wales the prime minister said he was “very proud of what our armed services did with Operation Pitting” and that “it was an amazing thing to move 15,000 people out of Kabul in the way that we did”.
Mr Johnson added: “I thought it was also additionally very good that we were able to help those vets who came out as well. But I can tell you that the military always prioritised human beings and that was quite right.”
The 173 cats and dogs were being looked after by the charity Nowzad, which was set up by former Royal Marine Pen Farthing. Whistleblowers and MPs criticised the animal airlift on the grounds that it drew on finite capacity at Kabul airport that could have been used to rescue people.
Emails provided to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee show that one Foreign Office official told colleagues working on the evacuation on August 25 that “the PM has just authorised their staff and animals to be evacuated”.
Further evidence of Mr Johnson’s involvement includes a report by Sky News that Trudy Harrison, Mr Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary, contacted a private charter company to secure a plane for the evacuation of the animals and staff.
A source at the company was reported as saying Ms Harrison was keen to get press on the plane in order to make the evacuation a good news story. They said she kept talking about “the boss” and that it felt obvious her request came with his backing.
Ms Harrison admitted to the broadcaster she told staff of her role working with the prime minister, but insisted he was not involved in any evacuation plans.
Mr Farthing’s friend Dom Dyer, who help campaign to get the animals evacuated, also told the BBC on Thursday: “There’s no question that the prime minister was involved, had oversight, had an interest”.
Mr Dyer said he been in touch with MP Ms Harrison. He said she “was definitely keeping the prime minister in the loop through the processes we were doing”.
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, also 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 had 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.”
