‘Clumsy and inept’: top UK envoy in Washington Kim Darroch slams Donald Trump’s ‘chaotic’ administration, warns it may ‘crash and burn’, media reports
- Britain’s Foreign Office said diplomats are paid ‘to be candid’ and offer an ‘honest, unvarnished assessment’ of their host countries
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Ambassador Kim Darroch reportedly said Trump’s presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace”, in the cache of secret cables and briefing notes sent back to Britain seen by the newspaper.
“We do not really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept,” Darroch allegedly wrote in one dispatch.
The paper said the most damning comments by Darroch described Trump, who was received by Queen Elizabeth during a state visit to Britain just last month, as “insecure” and “incompetent”.
A memo sent following the controversial visit said the president and his team had been “dazzled” by the visit but warned Britain might not remain “flavour of the month” because “this is still the land of America First”.
He reportedly wrote that the “vicious infighting and chaos” inside the White House – widely reported in the US but dismissed by Trump as “fake news” – was “mostly true”.
Darroch is one of Britain’s most experienced diplomats whose posting in Washington began in January, 2016, before Trump won the presidency.
The Mail on Sunday said the memos, probably leaked by someone in Britain’s sprawling civil service, cover a period beginning in 2017.
In one of the most recent reported dispatches filed on June 22 Darroch criticised Trump’s fraught foreign policy on Iran, which has prompted fears in global capitals of a military conflict, as “incoherent” and “chaotic”.
He allegedly said the president’s assertion, that he called off retaliatory missile strikes against the Iranian government after a US drone was shot down because it risked killing 150 Iranians, “doesn’t stand up”.
“It’s more probably that he was never fully on board and that he was worried about how this apparent reversal of his 2016 campaign promises would look come 2020,” Darroch reportedly stated, referring to the next presidential election.
Britain’s Foreign Office did not dispute the veracity of the memos.
“The British public would expect our ambassadors to provide ministers with an honest, unvarnished assessment of the politics in their country,” a spokeswoman said. “Their views are not necessarily the views of ministers or indeed the government,” and “we pay them to be candid”.
“Our team in Washington have strong relations with the White House and no doubt that these will withstand such mischievous behaviour,” the spokeswoman said of the potential fallout from the leak.
