B
en Wallace was
walking with his
son in the town
of Blyth in
Northumberland
on the evening of
August 15 as the
evacuation from
Afghanistan
gathered pace.
It felt natural for Wallace, a former soldier
and, as defence secretary, the man now
responsible for the armed forces, to pause
at the town’s war memorial.
“The names were all First World War
and Second World War,” he recalls. But
then he spotted “one from 2010” and it
pulled him up short. The name was that of
Guardsman Michael Sweeney, who was 19
when he stepped on a concealed bomb in
Helmand province on April 1 of that year.
Sweeney had served in the 1st Battalion
Coldstream Guards. Wallace had been aScots guardsman until he pursued a career
in politics. “I thought, somewhere in this
town he has left behind a mother and a
father, and I think he had a fiancée. He
would have been a young lad, brave, not
much older than my son, and they are all
going to feel let down.”
Wallace knew the feeling. He was
disgusted by the deal the Trump
administration had done with the Taliban
to pull American troops out, which was
then enacted with such haste by President
Biden. The following day Wallace was being
interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC radio
when it hit him hard. “There’s a really deep
regret for me,” he said, his voice cracking,
“some people won’t get back ...” Now he
was tearing up. Ferrari asked why he felt it
so personally. Wallace replied: “Because I’ma soldier. Because it’s sad. The West has
done what it has done.”
It was a rare moment of emotion from
a senior politician, one that seemed to
crystallise a nation’s disappointment about
a shoddy retreat. “Somebody said to me,
‘You shouldn’t say we won’t get everyone
out.’ I said, ‘I know we won’t get everyone
out, and if we don’t say it now, it will look
like we lied to people or misled them.’ ”
It wasn’t just Wallace who railed against
the evacuation. MPs listened in silence,
then applauded a furious speech by Tom
Tugendhat, the chairman of the foreign
affairs committee who had served in
Afghanistan, in which he spoke of his “anger
and grief and rage” at the “shameful” events.
Wallace, pointedly, said he agreed with “my
friend Tom Tugendhat” that the West should
be prepared to
stay longer after
conflicts, as it
did in Germany
after the Second
World War. “The
West is obsessed
with the idea that
you fly in and fix
everything and
go home, and
I don’t think
the world works
like that.”Above: Wallace’s emotional interview on
LBC in August. Right: Guardsman Michael
Sweeney, who was killed in Helmand aged 19“The West is obsessed with the idea that you fly in and fix
everything and go home. I don’t think the world works like that”
By Tim
Shipman