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Hello and welcome to Coffeehouse Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast. I'm Cindy

You and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and Isabel Hartman. So the pressure on

Dominic Raab keeps piling on as today revelations from the Daily Mail shows that that

that Dominic Raab rejected to have didn't actually happen with Zach Goldsmith, the junior minister.

So in the end, nobody called the foreign minister off the Afghan government. Isabel, do you think that this sort of pressure is just going to keep piling on?

And can he actually stay in his role?

Well, I think if he does get through this, which I think is what Boris Johnson will want,

he's always very resistant to sacking ministers or asking them to resign, particularly when

they are under a lot of media scrutiny for something that the Prime Minister regards as being

quite incidental. Then he would join the ranks of the much diminished in Cabinet, and there are

increasing numbers of ministers who have lost a lot of authority and political

capital and goodwill from their backbench colleagues, Gavin Williamson, being another

example of that. Matt Hancock did look set to be one of those, but he then decided to resign

over his affair with Gina Colladangelo. But I think one of the things, talking to conservative MPs that has

upset them, and it's not so much that he was on holiday when Afghanistan descended into this

chaos and the Taliban swept into power in Kabul. They understand that ministers need to have

holidays. I think there's a frustration that he seemed to take

quite so long to come back from that holiday. I think there was also an emotional response

to the story that he refused to take or to hold a call with his Afghan counterpart about interpreters.

Because interpreters are something that it's an issue that Conservative MPs have been very worried about for a very long time,

long before the Taliban's return was something that was being widely talked about.

...