Our politicians' response to Kim Darroch isn't only unjust—it also ignores the reality of diplomacy

The US President crassly insults Britain’s Ambassador to the United States. The Ambassador, Kim Darroch, resigns. The incongruous injustice of it is obvious.

I worked closely with Kim Darroch in Brussels and in London. I do not know the motive of the leaker, but they have done a cruel deed to an able and good man.

There are also big issues at stake. Was Darroch fulfilling his proper role? Should he have resigned? Should his resignation have been accepted? Did our government give him adequate support? Do they stand up to the weird man who now leads our most important ally?

Kim Darroch was Her Majesty’s Ambassador. His credentials as Ambassador to Washington were addressed by the Queen to the US President. At one level, those things are a formality, but they underline the significance of the role. In insulting Kim Darroch, Trump was insulting our Head of State.

Trump’s comments, and his gratuitous offensiveness to the Prime Minister, are typical of the man and—like all bullies—once he had started kicking his victim, he went on doing it.

The immediate response of the Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was equivocal. Darroch had his confidence but his views were his personal ones and Hunt did not share them.

Should the British government have been more robust? It should. Yes, Darroch’s views were personal in the sense that he is a person and he wrote them. But they represented a professional assessment of the Trump administration and how to deal with it, that will have been carefully weighed with others in the Embassy. That is what diplomats do.

I worked in the Washington Embassy under two professional Ambassadors. They had their nose to the ground; they put out the small fires which, even under normal Presidents, break out between London and Washington; they gave the government at home their best judgement as people experienced in their trade.

British Ambassadors—and there have been both Foreign Office officials and politicians in the role at different times—have sent candid, and not always flattering, assessments of US administrations. They did not leak. In the case of Darroch’s views, to most of us they read like statements of an evident truth. If Hunt really did not share them, then he was in a minority.

In 1973, the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, unilaterally and without prior consultation declared it “The Year of Europe”—the basic message being that Europe should do more to pull its weight in support of America. When Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath gave a speech mildly critical of the US, Kissinger summoned the British Ambassador Lord Cromer, a political appointee, and told him that the British government had single-handedly destroyed the special relationship.

The Foreign Secretary, former Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home, wrote a letter to Kissinger that was stylistically emollient, but firm on substance. In particular, he highlighted the fact that on one particularly vexed issue: the rights of Palestinians, the British (and wider European) policy was very different from that of the United States. The British and European view was, Douglas-Home wrote, the right one and we would stick to it.

Maybe our government is behaving in similar fashion and being tough in private. But the entirely misjudged invitation to Trump to pay a State Visit, and some sycophantic Ministerial utterances, suggest otherwise.

Should Kim Darroch have resigned? It is certainly a serious step. Kim was once head of the FCO Press operation, one of whose guiding rules is to ensure that you don’t, as a Press Officer, become the story. He will have reasoned that Trump’s vindictiveness would not go away and that, in an atmosphere of fear, others in positions in government in Washington would be nervous about doing business with him.

He may have reckoned, too, that his role would be compromised in the sense that he would become the darling of the Democratic opposition. As an ambassador, you have to be “in with the outs” without being “out with the ins.” That balance becomes hard if you are a figure of controversy.

Hunt came good in the ITV debate by supporting Darroch’s staying on in Washington to see out his term. Boris Johnson conspicuously did not and—since he is likely to be the next Prime Minister, and since Darroch will know his form—that may have played a part, too. I believe the Government should have discouraged Kim Darroch from resigning. Washington will soon go on its summer holidays; Darroch could have left in the normal way, later in the autumn.

In the wake of Trump’s first outburst, Hunt described the US government as Britain’s best friend in the world. I guess if you are busy alienating 27 other ones, that may be strictly true. But how about standing up for British interests?