Sir Kim Darroch
Last July, his tenure as British ambassador to the United States came to an acrimonious end when his damning assessment of Donald Trump was leaked, enraging the president. Sir Kim Darroch reveals all to Charlotte Edwardes
Lord Darroch of Kew is surveying his garden in Richmond. There are pink geraniums and Japanese anemone, crocosmia and pots of tomatoes and squash. The lawn is lined, mantis-green, bowling club-even. Come autumn, he will divide the beds.
But Sir Kim, 66, has not spent the year since his inflamed exit as UK ambassador to the United States just gardening. Good grief, no. He’s spent it penning a book about his final five days in the Foreign Office, writing in a tearing fury about the “monster” experience, “The worst of my life. Like being trapped in a nightmare.”
Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more brutal ending to such an unblemished 42-year career – a career that included posts such as national security adviser to David Cameron and ambassador to the European Union – than having Donald Trump, the US president, call you “the wacky ambassador”, “pompous”, “a very stupid guy”. It’s hard to imagine the indignity of Britain’s most senior foreign diplomat having to pull out of a meeting with Trump’s daughter Ivanka for fear of being blocked by security at the White House gates. Or watching in horror as his name dominated the news from Saturday, July 6, 2019, until he resigned on Wednesday, July 10. “Time heals and softens,” he sighs now. But he felt real anger, remorse, “existential bitterness” back then. “It was out of body, like watching a film.” Or being in a bad episode of The West Wing.
To recap: the crisis in UK-US relations was triggered by a leak to a Sunday tabloid of a cache of classified Foreign Office cables and correspondence, including a report on the Trump administration written by Sir Kim in 2017. It was never intended to be made public (until declassified in 2047). Instead, under the headline “Britain’s man in US says Trump is ‘inept’ ” were his bald descriptions of the president. Sir Kim used words like “dysfunctional” and “unpredictable”. He compared Trump to the Eighties cyborg assassin the Terminator. On one level, all the leak revealed was the ugly contradiction at the heart of embassy diplomacy everywhere. Ambassadors have for ever used the polite gloss of social occasions, flutes, canapés and small talk to gather acid assessments to telegraph back to offices deep in Whitehall. On another, it played into the hands of the populist narrative that anyone against Trump was somehow against Brexit and the will of the people.
Today, the former ambassador is relaxed. He invites me to ask “whatever you like”. (Were you a spook? “No, I wasn’t. Hmmm.”) Perhaps his Zen-like attitude comes from the yoga classes he’s been doing on Zoom. It’s in stark contrast to the world he inhabited until last year: a lifetime of having his ear pressed close to the government’s secrets, of playing confidant to the occupants of both No 10 and the White House.
read the full article on The Times
