Following Theresa May’s resignation, Dominic Raab ran to succeed her as both Leader of the Conservative Party, and Prime Minister of the UK. Most people seem to have forgotten that, but I think it’s key to understanding the true extent of his unfounded confidence. Raab’s qualifications for high office are near non-existent, but he doesn’t let that get in the way of his sitting at the Cabinet table, nor his ambitions to become PM. As Brexit Secretary, he famously admitted that he “hadn’t quite understood the full extent of” Britain’s dependency on the Dover crossing. Similarly, he once said that “the typical user of a food bank is not someone that’s languishing in poverty; it’s someone who has a cash flow problem”. To top it all off, in 2020, he declared that the act of taking the knee “seems to be taken from Game of Thrones”.

With these being his most famous moments, how he came to be both Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State remains a mystery. He worked in the Foreign Office between 2000 and 2006, but if that qualifies one to be the most senior politician after the PM, it wouldn’t be too hard to find someone who wasn’t Dominic Raab.

“You can say what you like about Priti Patel, but her determination for creating a police state is unmatched. Matt Hancock was short of a lot of attributes, but enthusiasm he had in spades. Raab, on the other hand, actively spurns his duties”

It is this current cabinet role that brings us to Raab’s latest demonstration of incompetence, which is by several lengths his most serious. Incompetence is a given in the current cabinet, but at least some of them put the effort in regardless. You can say what you like about Priti Patel, but her determination for creating a police state is unmatched. Matt Hancock was short of a lot of attributes, but enthusiasm he had in spades. Raab, on the other hand, actively spurns his duties. Why else would he go on holiday to Cyprus in the midst of the biggest attack on Britain’s global reputation since the Suez Crisis, and then refuse to come back despite orders from No. 10? He was too busy to accept calls from the Afghan Foreign Minister, yet found time to call up Boris Johnson and convince him to let him stay on holiday. The media has largely attacked Raab for his laziness. But this is more than laziness — it’s contempt. In the House of Commons, he even had the audacity to smile and laugh his way through the urgent debate.

The Cyprus scandal has stuck onto Raab, and this could well be attributed to the fact he’s not only let down Britain, or Afghanistan – but that he’s let down his party. Conservatives, once portraying Raab as the continuity candidate after Johnson, now see him for what he is: a disinterested career politician. The Conservatives famously love power, but as Stan Lee once wrote, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Traditionalist Conservatives, like Johnny Mercer, Tobias Ellwood, or Tom Tugendhat — all men from military backgrounds — would have been perfectly content for Raab to take his role, so long as he honoured it with hard graft and pride. That illusion has quite abruptly been shattered.

“The Cyprus scandal has stuck onto Raab, and this could well be attributed to the fact he’s not only let down Britain, or Afghanistan but that he’s let down his party”

Such figures, alongside former International Development secretary Rory Stewart, lead the way in illuminating Raab’s unsuitability for his role. Watching Rory Stewart speak to journalists in the past few weeks has been a much-needed reminder that there are people involved in politics who do care. His August 18th interview with JOE, for example, shows a man with humility, knowledge, and passion, heartbroken by a betrayal of an Afghanistan he had helped to build. Equally, as a veteran of Afghanistan himself, Tom Tugendhat has stepped out of the backbench shadows and shown what a monumental betrayal this is of our own soldiers, as well as the Afghan people.

Another veteran, MP Johnny Mercer, already dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack in his constituency in Plymouth, has come forward to lay blame at the hands of the government for the mishandling of the Afghanistan evacuation. He told an Isle of Skye newspaper that “it all feels so pointless now. The way ministers have carried on over the last week, without any real direction or leadership or responsibility, it 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 shouldn’t be up to these external voices to say all this. It is the duty and responsibility of the Foreign Minister to either admit his own failures and resign, or to insist on resolving them, and it’s the duty of the Prime Minister to make sure that happens. Seemingly, though, Dominic Raab would rather insist that there was no failure on his part. As of Wednesday morning, he has littered British media with excuses and justifications. “Given the deterioration in the situation it was absolutely right to come back [from Cyprus],” he tells BBC Radio 4.

But, adds the interviewer, the deterioration was clear from the Friday when he left for Cyprus. “I don’t think it was as clear as you’re suggesting,” Raab retorts. If it wasn’t so clear to him back then, one might suggest Raab begins to read the news. On that same day, the Guardian ran the front-page headline “Britain and US evacuate as Taliban advance on Kabul”; the Telegraph “Paras sent on rescue mission to Afghanistan”; and the Financial Times “Taliban steps up push as US and UK send troops to evacuate staff”. Maybe these particular papers weren’t available in Stansted.

This all builds to create a picture of a man unfit for office, let alone one of the most vital offices in British politics. If Dominic Raab himself can’t see that, then Boris Johnson should intervene and remove him. Although we all know that won’t happen.