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Let's start tonight by thinking about the people at the heart of today's big breaking story
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The Afghan volunteer soldiers, translators, office workers, support staff who helped invading British
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forces during the war against terrorism. Then in 2021, we abandoned Afghanistan. We scuttled
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A shameful retreat led by the Americans. Those people, our Afghans as it were
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were suddenly left behind in a world controlled by their deadly enemy, the Taliban
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Not many choices for them. They can stay with their families and hope never to be discovered
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risking, if they are, torture and death. Or they can try to get out and hope the British, whom they helped, will in turn help them
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Meanwhile, some dozy civil servant working for the Ministry of Defence mistakenly releases the details of Afghans who worked with Britain
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Names, contact details, phone numbers, sometimes their family members. In total, it's thought up to 100,000 people, including women and children
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were put at risk of being murdered by the country's new masters. What a catastrophic betrayal
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Do we know what's happened to them? They've presumably been fired long ago. Well, I don't think so, Andrew
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There's a question, exactly the first question that I put to the Defence Secretary this evening
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whether this person was still employed by the British government. lots of speculation about exactly what this person was doing. He said that they are no longer working
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in this particular policy area around Afghanistan. Well, that's a relief. But it's clear to me from
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his answers that this man, this person, woman, this person is still being employed by the British
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government. So we have 100,000 Afghans being put at potentially lethal risk. We've got a public
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bill potentially running into the billions of pounds, the very least 800 million, and a
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constitutionally defined precedent defined super injunction that could have a massive effect on the
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way our democracy works for years to come and not a single person as far as we know has lost their
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job over it not really for me i think to start to identify expose the individual that the investigations at the time underlined
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had mistakenly sent this spreadsheet in error. Can you tell us whether they're still in the employ of the British government
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They are no longer doing the same job on the Afghan brief
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But they're still employed by the British government? And this is, in the end, this is bigger than the actions of a single individual
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For me as Defence Secretary, now, in this government, my biggest concern and my first focus coming into government was to try and get a grip of something that was entirely unprecedented
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I understand. I do want to turn to those bigger issues, believe me. But I do think listeners will be interested
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This has obviously been, by your own admission, this was a serious departmental error
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error it has had profound and grave consequences right up to and including risk to life that was
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the entire basis that your department sought and secured the super injunction and you're telling
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me that that person is still being employed they weren't fired so the first of all
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the super injunction covered any of these questions yes and now we can finally talk about
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And accountability, transparency starts today. And it starts today because of the actions I've been taking during this course of this last year as Defence Secretary in the new government
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Has anyone been fired? To get to grips with the situation. Has anyone lost their job as a result of this
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Look, I'm actually not going to get into the personnel matters. I do think people listening, Defence Secretary, I mean, your colleague, the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, the other day called for people to lose their jobs at the BBC
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because of a broadcast by bob villan i would think however serious that might be i think a lot
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of people listening to this would consider that a situation where a huge amount of public money
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has been spent as a result of this thousands of people have had their lives uprooted there has been a constitutionally defying super injunction has never been applied in a situation like that before And we don know what consequences that might have And more jumaily 100 people up to have potentially been put at risk
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That's your own department's assessment. And no one's lost their job. So you have just made the case for the deep complexity of this situation
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No, I think it's a very straightforward situation. Well, let me finish if you don't mind
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and that requires the scrutiny that has not been able to be brought to this
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It requires accountability that's not been brought to this. And I have to say, look, under that previous government
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when you had ministers in the last government alerted to this data breach
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they could have chosen accountability, but they chose an injunction. And you've had that subjective..
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Indeed, I have. And I have for this period. Today, we're able to start that process of looking into those complexities and then starting to judge whether and in what ways people should be held to account
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It's not that complex, Secretary of State. A catastrophic error was committed with catastrophic consequences
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So I'm just going to ask one more time. We've had two years to get an answer to this question
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Has anybody lost their job? Do you think, let me put it another way, should someone lose their job over this
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So my first priority was not trying to conduct some sort of witch hunt on the defence official that released the spreadsheet that caused this profound data loss
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I think catastrophic is a fair word to use. Are they still employed by the MOD? And if so, what do you have to do there to get fired
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Well, our assessment, looking back on what is available because not all the information from the last government
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is available to a new government, as you will know due to the protocols of not sharing advice
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given to a former minister to a current one means that our focus has been quite correctly
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on what is happening today rather than the consequences of re effectively what happened in 2022 Our assessment is To be honest Luke that sounds astonishing
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Oh, absolutely. This is an unprecedented and really serious data leak. But our understanding
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from at the time, the investigation that the Metropolitan Police, when they looked into this
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matter, they concluded that no criminal investigation was required, that it was accidental. My word
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it's had serious consequences. Yeah, but they're still, this person is still working with you today
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There is a sense the Ministry of Defence in particular has a series of failures and nobody
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seems ever to be held accountable for them. Well, look, in defence of ministers, I feel a bit of
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lawyer-itis here that they've been told not to say anything about a particular individual
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What I would say is that the reason why it's important that we do right by the interpreters
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that we want to demonstrate to people who might be partners in the future
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that we can be trusted, that they can work with us in this way
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The same argument applies to somebody that might still be doing things in the Ministry of Defence
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This is about restoring trust and confidence. So I don't think that that person should be employed by the MOD
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I think this is, in part, this is about resetting this and saying
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this is wrong we need to have trust and confidence about going forward there have been cases where
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allies have been disappeared killed tortured um for months they were put in prison beaten
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ransom money was taken from the family and they were threatened not to come out and speak to the
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media or reported anywhere. We didn't know how the Taliban are finding these people
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Now, with this leak, it's bringing the picture together that the information that the Taliban
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were easily targeting these people, they had access to that information. And however they
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got it, they have got it
