HENRY DEEDES: Raab talking to the IDC about the DCO and NGOs? It’s a bit light on the LOLs

HENRY DEEDES: Raab talking to the IDC about the DCO and NGOs? It’s a bit light on the LOLs

Bamboozled by Line Of Duty? All that AFO, ARU and UCO gobbledegook? Try sitting thought the IDC (International Development Committee) rabbiting on all morning. It’d make your brain bubble.

For two hours yesterday, the committee grilled Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. For large swathes of their session, Raab and the committee may as well have been speaking in tongues. So many abbreviations were tossed around, it felt like being assaulted by the creators of Scrabble.

Some of the acronyms I was familiar with, others I had to look up. Several, I’m almost embarrassed to admit, remain unsolved mysteries. A SETO anyone? An MDC? How about a DHC? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

Still, a lively-ish session all the same. Mr Raab, you may recall, angered the aid community when the FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) gobbled up the DFID (Department for International Development) last year. Sorry, Raab won’t like me saying gobbled up. ‘Fused’ was the word he preferred to use.

For two hours yesterday, the committee grilled Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab (pictured)

Doing much of the talking yesterday was committee chair Sarah Champion (Lab, Rotherham) who radiated a certain relaxed, cappuccino charm. But beneath her saccharine smiles you could tell she was seething at DFID disappearing into the new and expanded Raab empire. Pauline Latham (Con, Mid Derbyshire) also regarded the FCO/DFID merger a disaster. Several NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) and INGOs (International Non Governmental Organisations) had told her so. She admitted some were even texting her during this meeting with their pungent views. Call me old fashioned but this struck me as rummy.

Much of Raab’s grilling predictably concerned ODA (Overseas Development Aid) which has been slashed from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of our GNI (Gross National Income). Whenever someone objected to this, Raab would flummox his interrogators with facts and figures.

When Chris Law (SNP, Dundee W) ranted at plans to reduce the science and technology budget, he got a lecture from Raab on how much of our GDP (Gross Domestic Product) we were still splashing out on RND (Research and Development).

Virendra Sharma (Lab, Southall) got a minor rollocking after criticising the Government for cutting the aid budget for women’s education to £400million. ‘Yes, but £400million is a rather large amount of money,’ snapped Raab. Mere chicken feed compared to those cashpoint-in-the-sky days of foreign aid!

Doing much of the talking yesterday was committee chair Sarah Champion (pictured)

Doing much of the talking yesterday was committee chair Sarah Champion (pictured)

Some of the conversations we heard were overly technical. Raab and Law spent a while discussing the merits of the CDC (the Commonwealth Development Corporation).

Meanwhile, Miss Champion was very keen on Raab’s department issuing monthly KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). They sounded suspiciously like some tool beloved of Human Resources departments. Whatever they were, Raab seemed happy to implement them.

With all these meaningless-sounding consonants, most people’s eyeballs would have been spinning. Dread to think of the Prime Minister trying to keep up with it all. Mr Raab though seemed rather at home. As a former lawyer, he’s clearly au fait with technocrat mumbo jumbo.

We heard a fair bit from Theo Clarke (Con, Stafford). Miss Clarke founded a not-for-profit aid campaign group called CGP (Coalition for Global Prosperity), though would sit just as comfortably modelling as one of Country Life’s Girls in Pearls.

She wanted to know whether our reduced overseas aid budget would still allow us to contribute to natural disaster funds. Raab said there was a reserve kitty of £30million for such occurrences, which is barely enough to cover a few Downing Street media rooms.

There was a tussle before the end when Miss Champion complained that people in the world were now ‘going hungry’ because Raab’s department was delaying signing off cheques to aid agencies. Raab said she was being OTT. He accused Miss Champion of deliberately forming ‘headline views’.

After an exhausting couple of hours, Miss Champion thanked Raab for his time and hoped he’d be back ASAP to answer more of the committee’s questions. He didn’t reply. In other words, TBC…