COLLATERAL DAMAGE BRITAIN, AMERICA AND EUROPE IN THE AGE OF TRUMP
KIM DARROCH Wm Collins, 400pp, £20
Sir Kim (now Lord) Darroch was until recently the British ambassador in Washington – until the leaking of his caustic report on the Trump presidency caused him to be withdrawn when the Donald tweeted: ‘We will no longer deal with him.’ This is Darroch’s account.
Jon Sopel in the Guardian enjoyed it: ‘ Collateral Damage is a sharply written book, full of dry and wry observations of a lifelong public servant who, having spent his career shunning the spotlight, suddenly finds himself at the heart of a media firestorm.’
Sopel wondered whodunnit. Who leaked the not-all-that startling news that the Ambassador didn’t think much of Trump? In the Sunday Times, Max Hastings deplored the dependency on internet communication which has made diplomatic candour so ‘perilous’. He thought the book slightly ‘banal’ (everyone the ambassador meets is ‘a thoroughly decent human being’) though he enjoyed some of the ‘bleakly comic detail’ about efforts to make contact with the White House.
In the Times, Edward Lucas noted approvingly that Darroch (with a lower second in zoology from Durham) was not the ‘Oxbridge brainbox’ customary in the Washington embassy. Though Darroch is gregarious, the book is ‘admirably un-gossipy. He writes wryly rather than gushingly about the social whirl.’ Lucas concluded: ‘Startlingly unreflective about his own buttoned-down personality (he was abandoned by his mother at the age of six), he delivers sharp insights about others; crisply critical about their decisions, while fairminded and even kind about them as people. Readers will get the feeling that he prefers to pack a punch rather than make a splash. Now he has done both.’