How did our man in Washington get Trump so badly wrong?
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Sir Kim Darroch is supposed to be our man in Washington. As such, his job is to be seen but not heard, except in the utmost privacy of the Foreign Office. Unfortunately for him, some of his most secret “cables” and “telegrams” (yes, such communications are still received and read at the FCO) have now been published in the Mail on Sunday. It is the diplomatic equivalent of standing up in the front pew at a wedding minus one’s trousers.
In the eyes of the President, Sir Kim is no longer our man, but “that man”. Donald Trump cannot bring himself even to name the envoy. “The ambassador has not served the UK well, I can tell you that,” he remarked. “I can say things about him but I won’t bother.” Given that many previous British ambassadors to Washington have enjoyed the confidence of presidents, such a public dressing down is as unprecedented as it is embarrassing. Trump is more likely to confide in Joe Biden than in Sir Kim.
The affair would not be quite so bad for the reputation of British diplomacy if the content of the Ambassador’s communications had been less banal. He was chosen at a time in 2016 when the Foreign Office, like the rest of the global establishment, assumed that they would be dealing with the second President Clinton. Trump’s victory gave our mandarinate an attack of the vapours from which some have evidently still not recovered.
A less conventional official would have adapted to the situation with alacrity. Not Sir Kim. Evidently stung by the newly-elected Trump’s half-serious tweet about how Nigel Farage would make a “great ambassador”, Darroch seems to have nursed a grievance against the man whom it was his job to cultivate. His leaked comments about how the UK could exploit Trump’s “inexperience” did not go down well, to put it mildly.
But the latest revelations about the quality of advice provided by our most expensive embassy make one wonder whether Sir Kim needs to get out a bit more. “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction-riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
The last clause in this litany of clichés is particularly unfortunate, coming from such a source, but the real cause for concern here is the Ambassador’s judgement. He writes snobbishly about the United States as “the land of America First”. He seems to have followed the herd at every stage. Is it news to him that Trump has been winning most of his battles and is on course to be re-elected next year?
Darroch makes much of “our own White House contacts” — he himself is supposed to be the main such contact, of course — but seems unaware of the shift of gear that evidently took place in the administration’s foreign policy last year, after Mike Pompeo took over as Secretary of State and John Bolton became National Security Advisor. The Ambassador’s dismissal of Pompeo and Bolton as “a more hawkish group of advisors” shows that he hasn’t grasped the new direction of the presidency, for example on China and Iran. To accuse Trump of lying last month about the aborted strike on Iran is worse than a crime: it’s a mistake. Pompeo and Bolton aren’t incoherent on Iran: that’s Britain and the EU.
A diplomat is supposedly sent abroad to lie for his country, but he is not supposed to make himself persona non grata. It has been known for millennia that once an ambassador is no longer received at the court of his host, his usefulness is at an end. Sir Kim can no longer be sent off to govern New South Wales, but he will no doubt earn a decent living on the after-dinner speaking circuit, regaling audiences with tales of the Trumps he knew so well.
Meanwhile, there is a serious job to be filled in DC. After such a fiasco, we need an emissary whom the President will give the time of day. That rules out pretty much all career diplomats. Now wasn’t there someone who knew Trump when nobody wanted to know him? Oh yes: we have the word of the Commander in Chief himself that Nigel Farage would make a “great ambassador”. Well, he could scarcely do more damage than Sir Kim, could he?
