The Darroch affair
A second tranche of diplomatic cables sent by Sir Kim Darroch, Britain’s ambassador to the US, was published by The Mail on Sunday this week. In these extracts, dating from May 2018, Darroch accused Donald Trump of abandoning the Iran nuclear deal to spite his predecessor Barack Obama, in what amounted to an act of “diplomatic vandalism”. Two days earlier, while announcing the launch of a police investigation into the leak, Met assistant commissioner Neil Basu had warned that any media organisation that published further secrets could be prosecuted. But Scotland Yard rowed back on that threat after MPs said it risked turning Britain into a “police state”.
Darroch resigned last week over the original memo leak, in which he described the Trump administration as “clumsy and inept”. Boris Johnson was accused of throwing him “under the bus” by failing to offer him clear support in a TV debate ( see page 27). Johnson conceded last week that his comments had been “a factor in [Darroch’s] resignation”, but insisted that this was because the US ambassador had been given a misleading account of his remarks.
What the editorials said
Any other president would have overlooked these leaked memos, said The Washington Post. Not Trump. By launching a series of crude attacks on Darroch that made his position untenable, he turned a “minor kerfuffle into a major diplomatic incident”. It’s yet more evidence of the president’s “inability to stomach criticism, and of his strange zeal for assailing America’s closest friends”. Darroch’s reputation is unharmed, but the same may not be true of the “special relationship”. Johnson is also to blame for failing to back Darroch properly, said The Independent. He’s not even in No. 10 yet and “we already have before us the tangled wreckage of the first crisis of [his] premiership. It does not augur well”.
“The whole sorry episode is rightly being seen as a humiliation for a country that desperately wants to see America as the gateway to a Global Britain after it has left the European Union,” said The Times. But that didn’t justify the extraordinary threat by the Met’s assistant commissioner to go after anyone who published further memos. While they might be embarrassing to the Government, and might have worsened Britain’s “already strained” relations with Washington, these cables pose no threat whatsoever to national security.