Westminster descended into a shameful blame game today after the exposure of an extraordinary government operation to smuggle thousands of Afghans to Britain.
Keir Starmer pointed the finger at Tories over the panicky response to a huge military data leak, saying at PMQs there were ‘serious questions to answer’.
However, Labour has been struggling to explain why it waited a year after the election to lift the unprecedented gagging order on the action.
Ex-defence secretary Ben Wallace has refused to apologise for the original injunction against the media revealing the details in August 2023.
Former veterans’ minister Johnny Mercer has admitted the ‘farcical’ process was the most ‘hapless display of incompetence by successive ministers and officials that I saw in my time in government’.
Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has warned that the dramatic news ‘raises significant constitutional issues’, with anger that MPs were kept in the dark.
After 23 months of being gagged, the Daily Mail revealed yesterday how the projected £7billion cost was signed off in secret.
But the revelation sparked another row last night as Mr Healey’s emergency explanation to Parliament appeared at odds with facts heard at unreportable High Court hearings over the last two years.
The covert airlift of thousands of Afghans – codenamed Operation Rubific – was launched after the UK military catastrophically lost a database of details of those who had applied for sanctuary in the UK to flee the murderous Taliban.
It put 100,000 ‘at risk of death’, in the Government’s own words. It also exposed British officials whose details were on the list.
After the Mail was the first newspaper in the world to discover the data breach, in August 2023, the Ministry of Defence mounted a cover-up and successfully hushed up our exclusive.
They obtained a super-injunction and ever since then, cloaked by the unprecedented news blackout, ministers have been clandestinely running one of the biggest peacetime evacuation missions in modern British history to rescue people the UK had imperilled – smuggling thousands out of Afghanistan and flying them to Britain at vast cost, with taxpayers being neither asked nor informed.
Every few weeks, unmarked government charter planes are landing at airports including Stansted and RAF Brize Norton packed with hundreds of Afghans, who are processed before being whisked off to a new life.
So far 18,500 Afghans whose data was breached have been flown to Britain or are on their way in taxpayer-funded jets. A total of 23,900 are earmarked for arrival.
They are living in MoD homes or hotels until permanent accommodation is found. More than 70,000 others will be left behind in Afghanistan and will have to fend for themselves after the Government yesterday shut the scheme.
Incredibly, hundreds of the Afghans rescued by the Government are now poised to sue the UK for leaking their data in the first place – potentially adding a further £1 billion in compensation to the colossal costs of the rescue and rehousing mission.
Former defence secretary Sir Ben this morning that his ‘first priority was to protect all those that might be at risk’ from retribution by the Taliban after a huge military data leak.
Sir Ben said he ‘made no apology’ for ordering officials to apply for the injunction in August 2023 – although he stressed it was envisaged as lasting for four months and he did not know why it was later upgraded to a super-injunction.
Meanwhile, current Defence Secretary John Healey said the Labour government waited a year to drop the draconian measure because it needed to ‘get on top of the risks’.
At PMQs, Sir Keir said: ‘There’s always been support across this House for the United Kingdom fulfilling our obligations to Afghans who served alongside British forces.
‘We warned in opposition about Conservative management of this policy and yesterday, the Defence Secretary set out the full extent of the failings that we inherited: a major data breach, a superinjunction, a secret route that has already cost hundreds of millions of pounds.
‘Ministers who served under the party opposite have serious questions to answer about how this was ever allowed to happen.’
Last October, ministers signed off the £7 billion project which ‘will mean relocating 25,000 Afghans [and] extend the scheme for another five years at a cost of c.£7bn’, the secret court hearings were told. The £7billion figure was used repeatedly throughout the case.
Yesterday, however, as the injunction was lifted, Mr Healey told the Commons the costs were actually only £400 million to £850 million, not £7 billion, while claiming the numbers rescued because of the data breach would hit 6,900.
An MoD official last night said there was a distinction between Afghans coming because their data was leaked and those on the list coming here anyway via other relocation schemes.
Making a statement before the start of PMQs this lunchtime, Sir Lindsay told the Commons there looked to be issues around Parliamentary privilege.
‘This episode raises significant constitutional issues. I have therefore asked the clerks to consider whether any lessons need to be learned from this case,’ he said.
‘If so, I will be reporting back to the House in due course.’
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir Ben said: ‘When we applied in August 2023, when I was secretary of state, we didn’t apply for superinjunction. We applied for a four-month injunction, a normal injunction.’
He said he had already left office by September 2023 when the injunction was converted into a superinjunction, so does not know why it was converted.
He defended his initial application, adding: ‘But nevertheless, I think the point here is I took a decision that the most important priority was to protect those people who could have been or were exposed by this data leak in Afghanistan, living amongst the Taliban who had no regard for their safety, or indeed potentially could torture them or murder them.
‘That was my priority.’
Writing in the Telegraph, Sir Ben said that when he was informed of the ‘error’ he was ‘determined that the first priority was to protect all those that might be at risk’.
‘I make no apology for applying to the court for an injunction at the time. It was not, as some are childishly trying to claim, a cover-up,’ he said.
‘I took the view that if this leak was reported at the time, the existence of the list would put in peril those we needed to help out.
‘Some may disagree but imagine if the Taliban had been alerted to the existence of this list. I would dread to think what would have happened.’
Challenged why the reporting restrictions were not lifted earlier, Mr Healey told Sky News: ‘Because we came into government a year ago and we had to sort out a situation which we’d not had access to dealing with before.
‘So that meant getting on top of the risks, the intelligence assessments, the policy complexities, the court papers and the range of Afghan relocation schemes the previous government had put in place.
‘And it also meant taking decisions that no one takes lightly because lives may be at stake.
‘And in the end, we were able to do this because I commissioned an independent review, which I published yesterday as well from Paul Rimmer that took a fresh look at the circumstances in Afghanistan now, four years on from the Taliban taking control, and the important thing it said was that it is highly unlikely that being a name on this dataset that was lost three-and-a-half years ago increases the risk of being targeted.’
As politicians tried to quell a wave of anger, it was revealed:
- Mr Justice Chamberlain, the judge who heard the case, queried the billions being spent saying: ‘I’m starting to doubt myself… am I going bonkers?’ And he questioned the MoD’s demand for secrecy by saying: ‘This is a resettlement programme for immigrants to the UK’;
- Amid a housing crisis, one in ten of the new arrivals is expected to ‘enter the homelessness system’;
- An incredible 20 per cent of all MoD property has been given over to housing Afghans;
- Ministers were privately warned areas with Afghan arrivals were ‘hotspots’ for last summer’s riots;
- The MoD warned of ‘the risk of public disorder’ after the super-injunction was lifted.
Adnan Malik from Barings Law, a Manchester firm that already has 1,000 clients ready to sue the Government, said: ‘Since the super-injunction was lifted, we have heard conflicting information from the UK Government which goes against facts which were previously heard in court.
‘We urge the Ministry of Defence to be clear and transparent with the public about the extent of this fiasco.’
Last night there was also a political storm brewing as the chairman of the Commons defence committee, Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, said he was ‘minded to recommend’ an investigation, telling the Commons the ‘whole data breach situation is a mess and is wholly unacceptable’.
Yesterday Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled: ‘There is no tenable basis for the continuation of the super-injunction.’
But the Mail and other media were hit with a second injunction brought by the MoD – this time to ban sensitive details from the database itself from being published.
