The United Kingdom’s ambassador to the US has resigned after a bunch of leaked diplomatic cables containing some unflattering observations about President Donald Trump set off a diplomatic spat between the two allied countries.
Kim Darroch, who’s been ambassador to the US since January 2016 and whose tenure was expected to last until the end of the year, wrote in his resignation letter that he wanted to end the speculation about his status in the US after the leak of the cables. “The current situation is making it impossible for me to carry out my role as I would like,” he wrote, according to the Financial Times.
“Although my posting is not due to end until the end of this year, I believe in the current circumstances the responsible course is to allow the appointment of a new ambassador,” he continued.
The current circumstances are these: On Sunday, the UK tabloid the Daily Mail published a batch of sensitive diplomatic cables and memos that Darroch had sent back home from Washington starting in 2017. In them, the ambassador provided candid assessments of the political situation in the US and his impressions of the Trump administration and the president himself.
And his assessments were not exactly complimentary. At various points, Darroch called Trump “clumsy and inept,” described him as “radiating insecurity,” and referred to the administration’s Iran policy as “incoherent” and “chaotic.”
He wrote that media reports of “vicious infighting and chaos” within the administration were “mostly true,” warned that Trump’s economic policies could be catastrophic for the global economy, and at one point wrote bluntly: “I don’t think this Administration will ever look competent.”
These unvarnished portraits of the president and his administration were intended to be secret, only shared with a very small number of senior members of the British government in order to give them insight on how to deal with a mercurial Trump. Writing these kinds of assessments for your government back home is one of the most important (and completely normal) parts of any ambassador’s job.
But though the cables contained the same sorts of observations that people within Trump’s own administration have made on many occasions, the notoriously thin-skinned president clearly did not enjoy having those remarks about him by a British diplomat published in a major UK tabloid.
And, of course, Trump — who’s doled out his own share of insults to British leaders, albeit in public — wasn’t about to let this go. Trump claimed Monday that Darroch was not well liked or well thought of (that doesn’t actually seem to be the case) and said the US “would no longer deal” with him.
He followed up on Tuesday with a tweet in which he called Darroch “wacky” and “a very stupid guy” and said he’d been told Darroch was a “pompous fool.” In both instances, Trump also insulted Prime Minister Theresa May’s handling of Brexit (because of course he did).
May had defended Darroch’s duty to report his uncensored observations, although she said she disagreed with his characterization of the administration. Jeremy Hunt, the UK foreign secretary, did the same — and on Tuesday, he responded directly to Trump’s criticism, saying it was “disrespectful and wrong to our Prime Minister and my country.”
Hunt, who’s a long-shot finalist to be the country’s next prime minister, also said if chosen as PM, he would keep Darroch as the UK ambassador in Washington until the end of his tenure this year.
But Hunt is probably not going to be prime minister, which means his opinion matters a lot less than that of the guy who probably will be: Boris Johnson. And during a debate on Tuesday with Hunt, Johnson refused to say that he would not fire Darroch.
That seems to be what prompted Darroch to finally step down; essentially, he saw the potential next prime minister as willing to sack him for political expediency.
Friends of Sir Kim Darroch say he decided the game was up last night after watching Boris Johnson refuse to back him during live TV debate
— Jason Groves (@JasonGroves1) July 10, 2019
Darroch’s resignation may be a blip in the US. But it’s a big deal in the UK.
Darroch’s resignation is rattling British politics — and it’s underscoring the strained, and somewhat strange, relationship between the US and the UK under Trump.
May called Darroch’s departure “a matter of great regret” and extolled his public service.
“Good government depends on public servants being able to give full and frank advice,” May said. And in what seemed like a not-so-subtle dig at the man likely to replace her, she added that she wanted “all our public servants to have the confidence to be able to do that, and I hope the house [House of Commons] will reflect on the importance of defending our values and principles, particularly when they are under pressure.”
Hunt said he was “deeply saddened” by Darroch’s resignation and that “it should never have come to this.”
Sir Kim served Britain with distinction for 42 yrs and whenever I visited Washington as Foreign Secretary, I was struck by his professionalism and intellect. Profoundly regret how outrageous leak caused this. Sir Kim deserves to look on his career with satisfaction & pride.
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) July 10, 2019
For his part, Johnson did praise Darroch’s service, and he repeated his call to find out who leaked the cables to the media. “I hope that whoever it is, is run down, caught and eviscerated, quite frankly, because it is not right that advice to ministers that civil servants must be able to make in a spirit of freedom should be leaked,” Johnson said, according to the Guardian.
Yet his noncommittal debate answers about Darroch resonated much more. Alan Duncan, a junior foreign minister, accused Johnson of basically throwing “this fantastic diplomat under the bus to serve his own personal interests.”
A Foreign Office source put it more bluntly to the Mirror: “The next PM publicly throws this country’s representative to the wolves to feed the ego of a fickle child in the White House. It’s tantamount to telling the civil service that they are totally disposable.”
And that gets to why this whole saga is such a big deal in the UK right now: It speaks to the sense among many in Britain that their politicians are kowtowing to Trump at the expense of their own country’s interests and power.
This is especially toxic in the age of Brexit, which in some ways is really what much of this debate is about. As the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin explained, “One of the premises that the Brexiteers operate from is that breaking with the E.U. will allow them to negotiate the independent trade deal of their dreams with the United States, which will, in turn, help them to tell the E.U. who’s boss, and for that they want Trump.”
In other words, some critics see Darroch’s resignation — and Johnson’s refusal to say he’d keep Darroch there despite Trump’s threats — as yet another appeasement to Trump for the prospect of some as-yet-unrealized trade deal.
Brexiteers claimed leaving the European Union would allow Britain to “take back control” from an overbearing EU, but capitulating to Trump isn’t exactly that. Brexiteers, Johnson among them, also warned that the UK could become a “vassal state” of the EU under May’s deal, but critics pointed out this deference to the US certainly looks like “vassal state stuff.” And nobody needs Darroch’s memos to tell them Trump isn’t exactly a reliable partner, especially when it comes to trade.
Boris Johnson sold Brexit to the British people as the way to regain our independence and to restore our national pride. Instead he is ushering in a craven subjugation to the narcissistic whims of a right wing nationalist US President.
— Nick Boles MP (@NickBoles) July 10, 2019
Darroch’s resignation also shows how weird the US-UK relationship is currently.
Simon McDonald, the top official in the UK Foreign Office, told members of Parliament on Wednesday that the last time the UK had diplomatic “difficulty” with the US was in 1856 — when the US accused the UK ambassador “of recruiting Americans to fight on the British side in the Crimean War.”
“President Franklin Pierce was in the White House,” McDonald said.
It was an (admittedly funny) attempt to illustrate just how abnormal this rift in the typically close “special relationship” between the two countries is.
And nearly all of that is because of Trump.
Trump has embraced controversial Brexiteer Nigel Farage. He’s retweeted British far-right propaganda. He’s insulted London’s mayor multiple times. He’s repeatedly criticized May on her handling of Brexit, despite barely grasping the issues at stake himself. And that’s not getting into the more substantive disagreements that have driven a wedge into this special relationship, from Iran to climate change.
This whole debacle will probably do little to derail Johnson’s chances of becoming prime minister, as just 160,000 or so Conservative Party members will choose the next leader and he’s pretty popular among them. But after July 24, when Johnson is expected to take over as prime minister, the politics aren’t going to be any less poisonous — on Brexit, or Trump.
