The situation was beyond belief. In Kabul, thousands of people desperate to escape the Taliban were besieging the airport, begging to be evacuated. But in Whitehall, the civil servants supposed to be helping them were logging off and heading home for supper as usual. Some of them had not come into the office at all: they were sitting at home while soldiers filled in for them.

This is the damning picture painted in a 39-page report published yesterday by the House of Commons foreign affairs committeeThe committee is made up of members of different parties and has the power to summon ministers to be questioned.. Its author, 25-year-old Raphael Marshall, is an ex-civil servant who was involved in the evacuation. He estimates that while over 75,000 people applied to his team for help, less than 5% of them received it.

Marshall claims that he and his colleagues were discouraged from working overtime because the civil service wanted them to maintain a "work-life balance". On one Saturday afternoon, he was the only person dealing with urgent emails, of which there were over 5,000 waiting to be read - some with the subject line: "Please save my children."

Another problem was that people were allowed to work from home instead of coming into the office. When soldiers were sent in to help, eight of them had to share one computer while they waited to be given their own passwords.   

Raphael's department was concerned with people who had linksThose who worked directly for the UK government were included in another scheme, the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy. with the UK government without working for it directly. He says the shortage of staff and vague instructions meant they struggled to work out whom to prioritise. In some cases cooks were rescued, but not interpreters.   

Reactions to the report have been horrified. "The real question that needs answering is, where was everybody?" said the head of the foreign affairs committee, Tom TugendhatA Conservative MP who served in the army in Iraq and Afghanistan.. "Afghans left to die in Kabul due to UK red tape chaos" ran The Guardian's headline.

Some are blaming "the blob" - a term inventedWilliam Bennett, then the US's education secretary, is credited with coining it in the 1980s. to describe a group who obstruct the government. Dominic CummingsCummings, a former chief adviser to Boris Johnson, was himself widely condemned for breaking lockdown restrictions in 2020. saw it as a combination of the civil service, the BBC, the law courts and the universities. He called its members "grotesque incompetents".

Michael Gove, when education secretary, opened up against the blob for obstructing reforms. Now the blob is being blamed for holding upBureaucrats are accused of not moving fast enough to order new vaccines and anti-viral drugs.   Britain's response to Covid-19 variants.

The civil service has long been seen as over-bureaucratic. When it was created in the early 19^th Century, rich people could buy a position in it. It developed a private language full of Latin tagsMemorable phrases., and was dominated by men from top public schools and universities.

But some believe that ministers are trying to blame the blob for their own failings. Raphael Marshall accuses Dominic Raab, who was then foreign secretary, of delaying the Kabul evacuation by making slow decisions. And he alleges that thousands of emails were opened but not dealt with so that Boris Johnson could tell MPs there were no unread messages.

Some say, yes: its members believe that they know better than anyone else and put endless obstacles in front of the democratically elected government. The civil service is a vast organisation so obsessed with red tape that it makes it difficult for anything to be achieved.

Others argue that the government, not the civil service, bears responsibility for most problems. Dominic Raab's failure to understand the urgency of evacuating people from Kabul had a fatal knock-on effect. Likewise, confused messages from Downing Street have undermined the pandemic response.