Jo Swinson was right about many things. Just after she became leader in 2019, she told Iain Dale that the worst thing about Boris Johnson is that he just doesn’t care about anything other than himself.
Nowhere has that been more obvious than in the way he has behaved over the evacuation from Afghanistan.
The way you act when you are in a leadership position is a powerful signal to those below you about how important you think something is. If you are passionate about getting something done, it’s very clear.
There’s a reasonable expectation that, at times of crisis, your leaders are going to look a bit like they are devoting everything to sort things out. You want to see a bit of worry, empathy, stress on their faces. We, instead, have a carefully dishevelled Prime Minister looking like he doesn’t have a care in the world, asking stressed staff at the Foreign Office if they are the ones being inundated by emails. I mean, I am sure that if Armando Iannucci had suggested that scene for The Thick of It, they’d have binned the idea as being too far-fetched. Ed Davey said that the video showed Johnson in his true light:
These flippant remarks show Boris Johnson in his true light, uncaring and unable to master the detail during this awful crisis.
The emails he refers to are from desperate family and friends worried that the Taliban will kill their loved ones.
Perhaps if Boris Johnson had understood and planned for the dangers of the Kabul evacuation, thousands of people would not be at crisis point.
Wendy Chamberlain added on Twitter:
Our MPs have been really good at supporting their staff with the emotional impact of this work with Ed taking time to message his appreciation. Their caseworkers work alongside MPs supporting worried loved ones and all of them really care about the people they are trying to help.
And then we discover from the Observer today that many of the emails sent to the Government from MPs were not even read.
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