His comments came as Abd el-Fattah’s aunt, the novelist Ahdaf Soueif, said there was a danger the British would “allow themselves to be deceived by the excuses they have been given since last December when we started asking for consular visits”. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak met Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi on Monday night on the sidelines of the Cop27 conference and said afterwards that he had raised Abd el-Fattah’s plight but nothing substantial has yet to emerge for his possible release. . Abd el-Fattah, a key figure in the Arab Spring, has gone on hunger strike and refuses to take water. Casson, who was UK ambassador to Egypt from 2014 to 2018, said “the next 24 to 48 hours are critical” and that now Sunak had his meeting “it’s really important today the system across the British government to mobilize to do Certainly the Egyptian government realizes that we mean it.’ He added: “It is important that secret and military channels in the UK tell their opposite numbers in Egypt what is at stake. The way Egypt works is that they realize that an issue has entered the vital heart of the relationship if it is communicated by the military and the intelligence services. Then they realize it’s the defining issue for our relationship now.” Abd el-Fattah’s life was in danger, Casson said. “This is not just one of those cruel things that happen, but it is created by choices that people make in Egypt. It is a fundamental duty of government to protect our citizens and I really don’t know what else we think we would be protecting if we hold back at this stage. This is the time for maximum pressure.” He questioned whether Sunak should have met Sisi before receiving assurances that the British embassy would be granted its basic rights of consular access. “The only thing Egypt longs for is to embrace itself as a normal country again after all the repressions in the Arab spring. If we keep giving them what they want for nothing, they’re going to sit back and ask for more.” He said the Foreign Office should focus on what gets results. “He needs to set out very clearly the long-term consequences for military exchanges, intelligence relations, trade and investment, so that Egypt does not feel that it is not being normalized and embraced politically.” Casson said the UK government should consider whether it should continue to provide the access it does to Egyptian officials given the fact that Egypt blocks consular access to a British citizen. He described Abd el-Fattah as a man with vision and values for the future of Egypt, but the Egyptian government seems to fear and persecute him. He said the case raised questions about whether the UK “needed a harder look after Brexit at where we are with our diplomacy and to better understand the power we have now and how we use it. In the last seven years, in many ways, we have not had a foreign policy in the way we meant it, in terms of the view of the world we want to live in, underpinned by a real understanding of our power and leverage and the cards we have to play ». He added: “It’s hard to name issues on which Britain has run the world”, saying that “this is partly because British diplomats have been quite traumatized by Brexit and have become very timid”. He said “a succession of prime ministers and foreign ministers had rather been distracted by domestic political signalling, and so there was not a steady focus on delivering the results we need”.
