The utter uselessness of Sir Philip Barton

Steerpike has seen many abject appearances before select committees. There was the time Sir Philip Green told Richard Fuller to ‘stop staring’ at him after BHS went belly-up. There was Russell Brand’s cowboy-hatted testimony on drug abuse. There was even the infamous occasion when Rupert Murdoch was attacked by a pie. But few civil servants have given such a pathetic performance as Sir Philip Barton managed today before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the loss of Afghanistan.

The Foreign Office Permanent Secretary was up before a panel of seething MPs to respond to this morning’s revelations about the department’s dire response to the collapse of Kabul. To say that his appearance was a turkey shoot would be an embarrassment to turkeys, as the former mandarin was asked again and again why he refused to cut short his leave as the Taliban prepared to take the capital. In the course of this afternoon’s grilling it transpired that the £185,000-a-year official – who has a pension worth £1.7m