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.
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.”
