Is the entire Cabinet totally incompetent? When the Foreign Secretary was requested to make a phone call to his counterpart in Afghanistan he declined to make the call.

He seems to have suggested a junior minister should make the call instead; it then emerges that in fact nobody made the call. This is outrageous! People’s lives are at stake and our Foreign Secretary doesn’t seem to care.

Many Conservatives then rushed to his aid saying that it would not have mattered because the situation was too fluid. What they don’t seem to understand is that if he had made that call it almost certainly would have made a difference because speaking to a junior minister would not have counted.

In the Middle East there is a certain pecking order in that you speak to senior people not junior people. The military work on this principle; a corporal does not ring a field marshal and tell them what to do or ask for assistance. It just does not work that way. This government is a disgrace; this Foreign Secretary is a disgrace; he is not fit for purpose and it is time for him to go.

None of our politicians are fit to be politicians, sending our service men and women to carry out tasks which are a politician’s dream of glory because only one or two of them have ever faced bullets in anger. We have 56,500 soldiers who are braver than any others. In reality an army should have at least 150,000 personnel. How dare our politicians pretend that we can police the world?

People laugh at Jeremy Corbyn but he is right; we have influence and a lot of it but it’s not for us to send these brave members of the armed forces here there and everywhere. Too many of them have died but more to the point too many have been injured by politicians and then they don’t look after them. Shame on all of them. We owe our soldiers a debt that all our governments have constantly refused to pay.

Ian Greenhalgh