THE Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan surprised nobody, with the exception of perpetually astonished foreign secretary Dominic Raab. Here’s what else he didn’t expect:
The sun setting last night
While lying on a beach in Crete Dom was staggered to find the light fading, the sun going all red and it getting colder. To a man who only recently learned the significance of the Dover-Calais crossing, the regular arrival of night is shocking, unexplained and something should be done about it.
Water makes you wet
But only when it touches you. Despite years spent watching the liquid compound of hydrogen and oxygen flow through rivers and fall from the sky, Raab was recently gobsmacked by this revelation after a car deliberately sped through a puddle and splashed him. He needed a lie down.
Stuff still happens while you’re on holiday
‘But I’m on holiday,’ Dom patiently explained to whichever jobsworth at Whitehall kept calling him with the trivial news of a human rights disaster, ‘so all that’s stopped because I’m on holiday.’ Dumbfoundingly it actually doesn’t, as he is now explaining to his uncomprehending boss Boris.
What goes up must come down
Isaac Newton’s third law of motion? Surely we left all that entrepreneur-strangling red tape when we left the EU? For Raab this is more of a frustrating riddle than a scientific principle. He’s been wrestling with it for decades.
The Earth is round
Greek philosophers had a hunch that our planet was spherical as far back as the fifth century BC. But the news would come as such a seismic discovery to Dominic Raab that he would interrupt his Sky News interview to tell Kay Burley, who would be equally amazed.
That you can become foreign secretary while being shit at everything
In Raab’s defence this one came out of left field for everyone. Sure, he laid the groundwork by toiling away at a law firm before joining the Foreign Office, but nobody seriously expected him to become a secretary of state one day. In a rational universe he’d be f**king up the judicial system, not foreign affairs.
