E-Paper
Operation Rubific, the portrait of failure
A rotten episode over Afghan refugees implicates much of the British state
There are two kinds of British scandal. The old kind resemble the plays of Henrik Ibsen: studies of character failings and personal humiliation brought about by greed, desire and dishonesty. Think of the disgrace of John Profumo, Jeffrey Archer and Jonathan Aitken. The new owe more to Joseph Heller: portraits of institutional failure, in which the craven, the cynical and the helpless are trapped in crises they cannot control.
They are less salacious, but far more corrosive, and they have piled up at alarming speed: from the negligence that saw patients treated with disease-ridden blood products to the bureaucratic inertia that led to the fire at Grenfell Tower and the fumbled response to the covid-19 pandemic. On July 15th another was exposed. In the High Court Mr Justice Chamberlain cancelled a super-injunction, applied contra mundum (against everyone), which had rendered a government programme called Operation Rubific a state secret. It was the attempt to conceal the leak of a database containing the names of thousands of Afghans at risk of murder by the Taliban, and the subsequent covert effort to bring them to Britain. The gagging order, the judge said, had become futile, counterproductive and a serious interference with free expression. The court papers read like a parody of 1950s Whitehall: low-level incompetence, an impulse to secrecy, a fixation with upholding institutional reputations and an aversion to accountability. The only riddle is which part of the state emerges most damaged.
Perhaps the affair is merely a coda to a grander humiliation. The original sin was the hurried allied withdrawal from Afghanistan. After 20 years of war in which 457 British troops died, President Joe Biden’s unilateral exit led British leaders to ask if the special relationship was so special. A strategic embarrassment became a political one: Foreign Office bigwigs were on the beach as Kabul fell to the Taliban. It was left to junior diplomats and the Parachute Regiment to provide a gloss of dignity by airlifting thousands of Britain’s Afghan friends—soldiers, translators, politicians—to safety, in a latter-day Dunkirk. For those stuck behind, a refugee scheme known as ARAP was set up. Britain moved on.
Or perhaps it is a story of data management. In February 2022 a marine handling ARAP applications inadvertently emailed his contacts a spreadsheet containing nearly 19,000 applicants, most of whom were still in Afghanistan, including former special forces known as the Triples. Extracts appeared on Facebook. It was not the first data leak from the unit. The question is not how a bootneck fumbled an email, but how the Ministry of Defence built a system where some of Britain’s most sensitive information could be let loose onto the internet by human error.
Or perhaps the greatest damage is to immigration policy. What was revealed in court was a pornographic fantasy for Reform UK. For years the hard right has claimed that immigration is a conspiracy inflicted upon the British people by secretive elites. In a paradox fit for Heller, ministers sought to assuage such concerns by creating a secret refugee programme, with journalists who reported on its existence facing jail. By May 2025, more than 16,000 people affected by the data breach had been moved to Britain. Councils were quietly paid to buy new houses for them; Parliament was told of a tweak in policy, but not why. Result: a noxious, paranoid vision of immigration has been given credence.
Or is the Treasury worst hit? The cost is absurdly murky. At one point, the High Court was told the cost of the affair would be £6bn ($8bn). “Am I going bonkers?” asked Mr Justice Chamberlain, who cited the bill as why the super-injunction became intolerable. The government now says the special immigration regime will cost £850m. The National Audit Office complains it has been kept in the dark. The problem for the chancellor is that lean public finances have produced a bitter debate in which voters ask why welfare should be cut when largesse rules elsewhere.
Or the judiciary? The initial blackout might be understandable in the dash to save the Afghans. But Mr Justice Chamberlain laid out his concerns with the super-injunction in November 2023, two months after it was imposed, declaring it “likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship”. The gagging order collapsed when, last month, the Ministry of Defence conceded the threat of Taliban reprisals from the leak was not so great after all. The court, the judge hinted, had been taken for rubes.
Some men have mediocrity thrust upon them
Perhaps the Rubific affair is a clash between two Britains. One is a warfare state, that aspires to send a force halfway around the world, recruit a local army, defeat an insurgency, lower the flag and return unburdened. The other is a welfare state that operates according to notions of a duty of care, data protection, human rights and intense public scrutiny. Maybe the old sweeping world of expeditionary warfare is hard to reconcile with a new thicket of moral obligations. But that may be too generous. In the House of Commons Sir Keir Starmer, who had come to office boasting of repairing the shattered public trust in the political class, thundered about how his opponents had “serious questions to answer” about the “failings that we inherited”. Yet the prime minister was a year in office before he pulled the plug on the cover-up.
The pattern of recent institutional scandals is unmistakable. They begin with low-level carelessness. Crises are massaged rather than confronted; a preoccupation with the “optics” of a policy triumphs over whether the policy is any good. So often, the first instinct of officialdom is to cover up, and then to lawyer up, and then, when that strategy is exhausted, to reach for the chequebook. And even then, names go unnamed; no one gets fired; and no one, ever, takes the blame.
