Why was a superinjunction put on the Afghan evacuation story and what did it do?

The Afghanistan superinjunction covered up the largest covert evacuation ever carried out in peacetime (Picture: Crown Copyright)

On Tuesday,it was revealed for the first time that the British Government had used a superinjunction to keep a secret from the public.

The term ‘superinjunction’ may be familiar to people who paid attention to the news in the 2010s,thanks to their deployment by several high-profile figures who wanted to stop people reading about their private lives.

It is a court order a step above an injunction,which is used to stop details of the case being published in public.

In a case with a superinjunction,not even the existence of the injunction can be made public.

These orders are powerful enough when used by an individual. The use of one by the government to keep the entire UK in the dark is unprecedented.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money was spent without the public’s knowledge,to bring a large number of individuals to the UK from Afghanistan without anyone being allowed to learn why.

This order was so stringent,then-shadow Defence Secretary John Healey did not tell his party leader about the situation when he was briefed before last year’s election.

Instead,Sir Keir Starmer learned about it after he became Prime Minister.