No one could have saved Sir Kim once his email leaked
LABOUR’S spokespeople are not exactly known for their objectivity, but even so the response of shadow foreign office minister to the resignation of Sir Kim Darroch as British ambassador in Washington on Wednesday takes the biscuit.
According to Emily Thornberry, Boris Johnson’s failure to back Sir Kim was “the most craven and despicable act of cowardice I have seen from any candidate for public office”.
Steady on. Even if you did think that Boris should have thrown his weight behind our man in Washington, his refusal to do so would surely not even rank as the biggest act of political cowardice of the day. That title would surely belong to Jeremy Corbyn for refusing interviews to respond to Panorama’s expose of anti-Semitism in Labour and his staff’s attempt to rubbish the documentarymakers instead.
But there is really very little that Boris – or anyone – could have done to save Darroch. There was nothing wrong with him sending a frank assessment of Donald Trump’s character and ability to govern in a private memo to London. Indeed, it is part of an ambassador’s job to provide such opinions.
Yet someone in the very small circle of ministers, civil servants and diplomats who would have seen the memo has decided to leak its contents. Once that happened it became impossible for Darroch to continue in his job.
SOME people – Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt included – have tried to assert that it is a kind of feeble surrender to Donald Trump to withdraw Darroch from Washington. We can’t possibly allow a foreign government to choose whom we send to represent us in their country, they say.
Yet ambassadors can only function if they have a positive working relationship with the government of the country in which they are working. An ambassador is a guest at a
foreign court, not a negotiator sent to meet opponents in order to get a good deal. It is not his or her job to be tough and unyielding, but to snuggle up to the foreign government and act as an intermediary when delicate protests and apologies have to be passed to and fro. At all times an ambassador should be seeking to calm down tensions created by the more robust political exchanges going on.
Moreover, it is simply not true that the UK government can impose whoever it likes as its ambassador in a foreign country. Anyone appointed to the role must present their credentials to the foreign government and can be – and in some cases are – rejected.
Once the contents of Darroch’s memo became public, with its unflattering comments about Donald Trump, it became impossible for him to carry on doing the job of ambassador. At any time, but especially now when we are trying to build new alliances around the world for life after Brexit, it is essential that we have a well-functioning diplomatic mission in the US.
Like him or loathe him, Trump is the man we have to deal with when we do business with the world’s largest economy and biggest military power. We simply cannot have effective relations with the US if it is public knowledge that our ambassador despises the president.
While Darroch was only scheduled to serve six more months in Washington his personal spat with Trump would have poisoned every exchange we have with the US government. This, at a time when we would be trying to make progress with a trade deal.
It would have been far better had Sir Kim Darroch been quietly withdrawn from Washington and transferred to another post.That the affair has been allowed to be blown up into the incident it has is partly down to the Conservative leadership election. Opponents of Boris Johnson have seized upon his failure to support Darroch to try to attack him for feebleness, indecision and being too close to Trump.
YET Boris comes out of the affair rather well. Everyone involved in it, except him, has been horribly rude about someone else. Darroch has been rude about Trump. Trump has been rude about Darroch and Theresa May.And a great many people – including foreign office minister Sir Alan Duncan, who is campaigning for Jeremy Hunt – have been rude about Boris.
Boris has not always appeared as a great statesman – he fell somewhat short as foreign secretary. But on the Darroch affair it is Boris who has emerged as the statesman, who read the situation well, and who appreciated the importance of Britain’s special relationship with the US.
His detractors have themselves no favours.
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