Sir Kim, the council house kid who got the plum job

SIR KIM Darroch’s gilded lifestyle, meeting the great and the good at Britain’s lavish Ambassador’s residence in Washington DC, is a world away from the council flat he grew up in.

His parents split up when he was just six years old, forcing his family to leave behind their hitherto comfortable life in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father taught in a private school.

His mother Edna moved Kim and his younger brother back to Britain and into a flat on a council estate in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.

From there, many boys would have gone on to work in manual employment. But Kim, a bright student, had other ideas.

After soaring through the entrance exams, he won a free scholarship to attend Abingdon School, a leading public school that charges £20,000 a year for day pupils.

‘I think I was the only person in the school uniform walking out of this council estate every morning to go to school,’ he recalled in a recent interview.

‘I think what it teaches you is that all things are possible no matter where you come from, if you put the work in.’

After finishing his A-levels, he studied zoology at Durham University because – in his own words – he was ‘naturally lazy’ and it was an ‘easier option’.

He joined the Foreign Office in 1977 after graduating because ‘they were the first people to offer me a job’ and started his ascent through the ranks at Embassies around the world, including top roles dealing with EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

When he landed the most prestigious diplomatic post in the Foreign Office – British Ambassador to the United States – in 2016, Barack Obama was winding down his presi dency. Sir Kim and his wife Vanessa, who he married in 1978, soon settled into the comfortable private apartment in the Embassy, widely regarded as the finest in Washington DC.

It has a ballroom, boutique hotelstyle guest rooms, a library and beautiful gardens. It was his reward for 40 years in the Civil Service, and he threw himself into the social whirl. The residence hosts almost 800 breakfasts, lunches, dinners and cocktail parties a year, and Sir Kim reportedly shows up at 90 per cent of them.

His job was relatively straightforward – until Donald Trump arrived.

Days after winning the Presidential election in November 2016, Trump was tweeting that he’d prefer his friend Nigel Farage, the former Ukip leader, to be Britain’s Ambassador to the US.

No 10 insisted it was for Britain to decide who serves as its Ambassador, while Sir Kim bit his tongue. But it’s clear Trump created unprecedented challenges even for this most experienced of diplomats.

There is no doubting Sir Kim’s deep patriotism (his mobile phone cover is a Union Jack) and colleagues in the Foreign Office consider him to be a first rate diplomat. However, it is his long postings in Brussels that have earned him a reputation as a europhile, and he is mistrusted by Brexiteers.

He was Tony Blair’s top Europe adviser from 2004 to 2007 and then became Britain’s Permanent Representative to the EU from 2007 and 2011.

Knighted in 2008, he became David Cameron’s National Security Advisor, from January 2012 to September 2015, before his Washington posting.

Now aged 65, Darroch is nearing the end of his diplomatic career.

Even before today’s revelations in The Mail on Sunday, few expected him to survive in Washington DC after the next UK Prime Minister takes office.

Now these unfortunate leaks may just hasten his departure.