IN any normal week the parliamentary findings on Britain’s handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan would surely still be dominating the news agenda.

But when it comes to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the ongoing Partygate scandal it must seem like there is no such thing as a normal week.

But the Foreign Affairs Select Committee report deserves more attention than it has perhaps received. Because, if anything, it shows up the utter inadequacy and failures of Johnson and his ministers and, more worryingly, how that is staining government as a whole.

Because the report is an utterly damning indictment of an operation that through its incompetence, lack of planning and failure of leadership betrayed UK allies and put many lives in danger.

The report not only points out the Foreign Office's inadequacies, but also how it tried to cover them up. Answers provided by the Foreign Office to the committee were, the report found, “in our judgment … at best intentionally evasive, and often deliberately misleading.”

The committee, chaired by Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, even went so far as to say that the senior civil servant in charge of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, should consider his position.

As for the then Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, well, he doesn’t come out of it well. He had one conversation with the British ambassador in Kabul in the two weeks before the city fell, was on holiday when Kabul fell, as were the Prime Minister, Lord Ahmad, the Minister for Afghanistan and Sir Philip Barton.

Sir Philip didn’t return until August 26, the day the civilian evacuation ended. If he had any sense of shame, he would have resigned by now. But then if he had any sense of shame he would have resigned last August. Raab too, come to that.

What the report tells us, most worryingly however, is that this was not a failure of a few politicians or senior officials. This was a wholesale failure of governance. When the US announced that it was going to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 2021 it didn’t prompt the Foreign Office to plan ahead. It seems it hoped that the US would change its mind. What planning it did came too late and was too slow. It was also inadequate and frankly incompetent. Emails from desperate people were not read. Sensitive documents were left behind, as were many of the people who helped the British efforts in Afghanistan. Nearly a year on and many of them are still waiting for visas. Who knows how many have been killed?

The committee’s report is a catalogue of governmental inadequacy, arrogance, incompetence and a shocking dereliction of duty. In that, I’m afraid, it is also a reflection of the man in charge. In its laziness, lack of planning, optimism bias and mendaciousness the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan is a mirror image of the Prime Minister’s own failings. It should worry us that Johnsonism seems to be contagious.