Alastair Stewart: The foreign secretary's performance went from bad to worse at select committee

As the Foreign Secretary’s grilling by the Foreign Affairs select committee stretched from an hour, to an hour and a half, to an hour and thirty eight minutes, it went from bad to worse.

Military and diplomatic policy needs to be guided by the best possible intelligence. Dominic Raab confirmed the intelligence community got Afghanistan profoundly wrong.

The Joint Intelligence Committee - a meeting of civilian and military sources - predicted a ‘steady deterioration’ and said it was unlikely Kabul would fall ’before the end of the year’.

You’d need to know just how many Brits, folk who’d worked for the Brits, and Afghans who were friends of the Brits, were at risk. But Dominic Raab didn’t.

You need to know precisely how many remain; he didn’t.

You’d need to know what your biggest and strongest ally was likely to do; he didn’t.

‘Some thought Biden would change his mind’, he said. The President didn’t.

He thought NATO would act together; they didn’t.

On the evacuations, it was pointed out to him the Germans and French had acted quicker and had got more out.

It was put to him we are ‘caught on the hop’ and that it had been a ‘withering failure’.

He rejected that but conceded ‘we will have to look at how we can correct that, for the future’.

‘How did the intelligence come to be so wrong?’, he was asked. ‘We knew the Taliban’s intent but not their capacity’, came the reply.

And as for him and others having ‘their eye off the ball’ - even ‘Missing In Action’ on holiday, Mr Raab was asked nine times about his summer escape to Crete. He said it was regrettable — that, on reflection, he wouldn’t have gone.

But the actual dates of his now infamous holiday remained a ‘state secret’.

Towards the end Mr Raab said aid and diplomacy would play a part in the immediate and troubling future. But the Taliban would have to do the right thing and act honourably.

Good luck with that.

And he conceded, when asked if we will still have to be dependent on the US in the future, ‘We need to look at that and at our own capabilities and partnerships.. the absence of the US, he said, is a ‘psychological’ blow’.

We weren’t alone in Afghanistan, he concluded, but we have to frame a new reality and look closely at other ‘agile clusters’ of global friends…

Many fine words were uttered, and in the main the well-informed MPs were courteous in their pressing.

The Foreign Secretary, who had done his homework, was generous with his time.

It all made the revelations even starker:

Ill-prepared, poorly advised, over confident, caught on the hop by our most important ally, left looking slow off the mark by other allies, and left searching for a new arrangement with allies and a pretty chilling assessment of what the UK can and can’t do on the world stage in the wake of this defeat.

In short, he and the rest of the Government, who knew the Taliban’s intent, underestimated , as Raab put it himself, ‘their capacity to achieve it so swiftly.

And they also fundamentally misjudged the President of the United States of America - our closest ally, with who we are supposed to enjoy ‘a special relationship'

That's tonight's Viewpoint.