7 days ago
Washington ambassador who quit after calling Trump ‘inept' says he was proved right
A former ambassador to the US who quit after calling Donald Trump's administration 'inept' in leaked private emails has said he was proved right.
Lord Darroch resigned in 2019 after confidential cables criticising the US president's government were leaked to the media.
The long-serving diplomat described Mr Trump's administration as 'dysfunctional', 'inept' and 'divided' in a series of emails from 2017.
Mr Trump responded by calling Lord Darroch 'a very stupid guy' triggering a diplomatic row which eventually forced the British ambassador to step down from the post.
Lord Darroch doubled down on his comments at an Edinburgh Fringe show on Tuesday, arguing that the subsequent chaos of Mr Trump's premiership proved he was 'right'.
He told Ian Dale's All Talk show: 'If you're going to crash and burn on the basis of one piece of reporting that you've done, leaking, please God, make it a piece of reporting where all the predictions are right.
'I would say, if you read back that letter that was leaked, that was written after six months of Donald Trump and had a number of predictions about how the rest of his term would run, then you'd struggle to find anything that didn't turn out the way I had predicted it.
'So if that's the way to go out, it's better than the opposite.'
Lord Darroch added that he had 'already' decided to retire when the row broke out.
'I was six months off finishing anyway and I had had an extraordinary, lucky career', he said.
In an interview with BBC Newsnight in 2020, Lord Darroch said he knew his position was untenable when the emails became public but defended taking his plain-speaking approach.
'I never regret the terms in which I'd reported,' the former national security adviser said.
'I spent 40 years in the Foreign Office writing in these terms and people hitherto had thought it a strength and an asset. There is nothing unusual in reporting in clear and direct terms.'
Speaking at Fringe, he added that it had in fact been Lord Cameron, who appointed him to the post in January 2016, who requested that he write in a more frank manner.
He recalled the former prime minister saying: 'I'm fed up of reading all these letters to ambassadors which say, on the one hand, on the other hand, which are written in code. What you have to do is tell it like it is. Be clear and call out what you're seeing.'
'That letter, which was trying to give an accurate summary of how Trump's first six months had gone, was in part a response to Cameron saying tell it like it is. Don't write in code,' said Lord Darroch.
