Will Raab’s weakness be the thing that saves him from Johnson’s axe?

With no great sense of irony, the Labour Party, no stranger to internecine struggles, has accused the government of “fighting like rats in a sack” over the Afghan debacle. Still, it has a point. Even by this government’s leaky, backbiting standards the war of words over who is to blame for the mess continues. Of the various heavyweight rodents involved, it is Dominic Raab is is mostly getting his tail chewed, and looks increasingly uncomfortable in his role.

If you can be bored when at the centre of a global emergency, then Raab seems to have done it. Perhaps due to stress or the rigours of medium-haul flights, or perhaps the way he is being picked on, the foreign secretary, a man who prides himself on his physique, was looking rather tired during his press conference in Qatar. He remains his softly spoken self, but has the demeanour of a man who is simply fed up. His enemies claim that his lack of interest in Afghanistan and the region generally – rarely speaking to, let alone visiting, the major players such as Pakistan – contributed to the humanitarian and geopolitical disaster. At the podium in Doha, Raab displayed no great appetite for the reconstruction and refugee challenges ahead – even though his department swallowed the Department for International Development in a pointless power grab. Raab might not be interested in nation building, but he’s good at empire building.

He has only just partially recovered from his punishment beating at the hands of Tom Tugendhat and his Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and about a fortnight of abuse from colleagues and the press over his ill-starred break in Crete and the previous months of unpreparedness. Yet the hostile briefings and even public statements continue. Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence are still putting the boot in. The defence secretary, Ben Wallace, claims that the foreign secretary should have known months ago (if he was paying attention) that the game was up in Afghanistan. No 10 has insisted that Boris Johnson has “full confidence” in Raab, which, in reality puts him in extreme jeopardy. Will the rat be chucked off the ship at the next reshuffle?

There would be few tears shed on the Tory backbenches. Although bright and an ardent and sincere Eurosceptic, there are no Raab-ites in the party to protect him, no faction of praetorian guards, and he has created many enemies over the last few weeks. He garnered 30 MPs’ votes in his quixotic bid for the leadership in 2019, and that was probably the high water mark of his popularity. Cerebral and mildly obsessive, he isn’t the clubbable type. Such is the shock of military defeat to the Conservatives that they must react in the only way they know – find a scapegoat, and Raab, weak and beleaguered, will do.

Yet his very weakness may well save him. Johnson sometimes seems to operate under the David Brent maxim of never appointing anyone as your deputy who could do the job better than you. So it was that Raab, who finished sixth (of ten) in the leadership poll of 2019 was catapulted into the foreign office and also created “first secretary of state”, the nearest to a formal deputy Johnson has, and functioned, nervously, as such when the prime minister went down with Covid in March last year.

If Raab is to be jettisoned then who would Johnson promote and make a more credible rival? Sajid Javid? Liz Truss? Most of the contenders would be dangerous, and, besides, Johnson actually doesn’t care much what his MPs think and hates giving the Labour Party a scalp. In that callous, careless way of his, the prime minister may even secretly agree with Raab that there was nothing that could be done for the Afghans in any case, and hadn’t been since Donald Trump signed the treaty with the Taliban last year. Such calculations will no doubt be clicking their way through the minds of top Tories right now. Rats, we should remember, are also intelligent creatures, and excellent at survival.