British ambassadors must be blunt and vivid - otherwise they are useless
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To anyone who has worked politically in the Foreign Office as a minister, or special advisor, the memos from the British Ambassador in Washington back to London will come as no surprise.
Britain has fewer diplomats for its size than most other G7 nations. The job of an ambassador is to be brutally frank about the government and leaders of any country he or she is sent to.
As an FCO minister I was startled at the sharpness of points in briefings prepared by ambassadors for ministerial visits. One president might have a serious cocaine habit, another vice-president was a transvestite, a third used his office for dubious business practices, a fourth kept his mistress in a private apartment separate from the family home.
Given phone calls were routinely intercepted, nothing seriously confidential was said on the phone. Ambassadors’ emails went to No 10, to other departments dealing with international relations, and once printed out to go into ministers’ boxes were easy enough to copy as the red box was worked through at home in the evening.
Kim Darroch was trusted and liked by all across the political spectrum. It is a long while since a British ambassador in Washington enjoyed any real intimate relations with a US president. It is the next layer down of White House staff, cabinet members, like Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, who loved coming to the grandiose Lutyens designed British ambassador’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue to play the piano in a quartet of classical musicians.
A US president will always take a call from a British prime minister so ambassadors are not needed or of much use in formal meetings with any US president.
In fact, the Darroch memos read as if they come straight from the two books – Fire and Fury and Siege – that Michael Wolf has written about the inner workings of the Trump White House.
But the revelations in the two books are far more dramatic, as indeed are any number of articles about how Trump operates written by knowledgeable Washington journalists.
Far more interesting is to work out who made copies of the Darroch memos and decided now was a good time to publish them in the paper every Tory Party activist and voter deciding the new British prime minister reads each Sunday.
The most explosive of the Darroch memos come from the era when a certain well-known journalist who knew how front pages worked happened to be the Foreign Secretary. The by-line on the story in the Mail on Sunday is a journalist with close links to the Tory and Brexit inner circles under the patronage of Lord Michael Ashcoft and Aaron Banks, from whom she has received handsome emoluments as a fluent pacy writer.
The stories appeared, and showed one candidate to be Prime Minister in a positive light – if an endorsement by President Trump is considered a way of gaining status from Tory members who will choose our next PM.
Kim Darroch is 65, the normal retirement age for British ambassadors. If Whitehall has any sense he should be kept on a few months to show that even a US president cannot treat one of the Queen’s most senior and loyal servants as someone Trump can fire at will and on a whim.
There is no point in setting up a massive leak inquiry. Anyone who has worked in the FCO can work out what happened. It’s politics, pure and simple.
