A Tory MP has compared his party to a "s*** company where everyone takes the p*** out of you" as he launched an astonishing attack on Boris Johnson over the Afghanistan crisis.
Johnny Mercer called the UK's snap withdrawal from Afghanistan a "total betrayal" and ministers' blaming of US President Joe Biden for the lightning takeover of Kabul by the Taliban a "copout".
The Plymouth Moor View MP, a former soldier who served in Afghanistan, was also unsparing in his assessment of his party's conduct in recent months, telling the Evening Standard on Wednesday: “Being in a Tory Party at the moment is like working for a really s*** company where everyone takes the p*** out of you and everyone running it hasn’t got a clue.”
Turning to the unfolding catastrophe in Afghanistan, as people fearing for their lives desperately try to flee the country, he said troops' withdrawal was a "total betrayal", adding: “The way ministers have carried on over the last week, without any real direction or leadership or responsibility, just makes it ten times worse.
"That’s why I shall speak out on it. Constantly blaming the Americans devalues our service even further."
It came as Keir Starmer called for the PM to sack Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who was on holiday in a plush hotel in Crete when the Taliban took control.
The MP also hit out over the Government's handling of Jake Davison's gun rampage in Plymouth. The killer took the lives of five people, including a three-year-old girl in what Mr Mercer called an "unspeakable" act which had scarred the community of the coastal city.
But Mr Mercer said no-one from the Conservatives called him to offer support.He said the SNP's Westminster leader Ian Blackford called, and added: “I thought that was very nice, but not a single member of the Conservative Party phoned me up."
And turning to Boris Johnson's Downing Street, the former Veterans Minister, who resigned over the Government's handling of former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland said people were promoted for their support of the PM.
He said: “What’s going on now is indicative of how we do politics. If you exclusively promote talent to important positions based on sycophancy to the leader and their controllability from the centre rather than those who are really going to inspire people and have some degree of expertise in what they’re doing, that’s ok, it’s all ok and it’s all funny and we make programmes like Yes Minister and it’s all ok until you hit a crisis, which is what Afghanistan is.
“And when that happens, and you need departments to function and you need leaders to lead and they’re not in place...in this stuff, it costs lives. Our failure to relocate Afghans who worked for us will result in them dying. Whatever you come into politics for, it’s not that.”
He went on: "It’s all part of the system where everyone’s just looking upwards all the time and telling the Prime Minister what he wants to hear. The whole time. Whether it’s Number Ten around the Cabinet table or whether it’s in the departments.”
Asked whether, given his words, he planned to continue as a Conservative MP, he said: “I’m not going to lie to you; it’s something I think about every day."
