Mission accomplished.
Or,
if you prefer: game, set and match. (Yes, sorry, I’ve been watching a lot of
Wimbledon.)
Whoever
leaked those not-so-diplomatic missives from Our Man in Washington had two
simple goals: to make it impossible for the UK ambassador to continue to do his
job, and to suck up to Donald Trump.
Ah.
Un problemo, as Boris Johnson might say. Because it wasn’t the British
ambassador who used those words, but Mr Johnson himself, when he was still
mayor of London and the then Republican presidential candidate had upset him by
suggesting that parts of London were ‘no-go’ areas for the police because large
numbers of Muslims lived there. (You can watch Mr Johnson venting his spleen by
clicking here.)
As
you may remember, the pro-Brexit campaign was built on a simple, clever slogan:
Take back control. It was, of course, a sick joke. Even before the UK has left
the EU, it has sold – no, not sold, given away – its independence of action to
a would-be despot in Washington. Imagine a lapdog jumping through hoops, and
there you have the perfect image of Mr Johnson’s relationship to the US
president.
Trump
could, of course, have ignored the ambassadorial leaks – they weren’t the first
such unauthorised disclosures, nor will they be the last. (WikiLeaks, anyone?)
But he seized his opportunity: Kim Darroch, he said, was a ‘wacky ambassador
that the UK foisted upon the United States’ – a ‘very stupid guy … a pompous
fool.’
(Perhaps
he doesn’t know – in fact, he certainly doesn’t know – that Darroch grew up on
a council estate, won a scholarship to a private school and then studied
zoology at Durham university. Unlike, for example, Boris Johnson. Eton and
Oxford. Of course.)
To be
fair, and in the interests of reciprocity, which is a time-honoured principle
of international diplomacy, we should note that any Western ambassador in
London could have used exactly the same descriptions of Theresa May’s
administration as Sir Kim did about Trump’s. Dysfunctional, faction-riven,
clumsy and inept? Yup, spot on.
Trump’s
insults in response were, as Martin Kettle wrote in The Guardian, ‘knowing
acts, deliberate interventions, designed to weaken a country that thinks of
itself, and is still often seen in Washington, as America’s special ally. They
were a wilful assertion of power over Britain … a crude act with implications
for any country that seeks alliance with America or indeed with any other global
power. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin will have been watching approvingly.’
So Darroch
came to the view that he had no option but to quit. (I can’t help
wondering, however, why the Foreign
Office couldn’t have refused to accept his resignation.) And Boris Johnson, by
deliberately and repeatedly refusing to back him, sealed his fate.
It’s not
hard to work out why. Johnson thinks Trump will be post-Brexit Britain’s
salvation. ITV’s political editor Robert Peston reported last Wednesday: ‘This
summer, Johnson wants Trump to publicly celebrate his very special relationship
with a Johnsonian Britain – in the twin hopes that this expedites a post-Brexit
trade deal with the US and (perhaps more importantly) it persuades EU leaders
to belatedly agree an acceptable Brexit compromise, to stay on the right side
of a UK that may seem stronger as Trump’s acolyte.’
Yes, you
read that right. ‘Stronger as Trump’s acolyte.’ Stronger as the plaything of an
unpredictable, frequently unhinged, always ignorant narcissist, than as a major
partner in an alliance of 28 democratic, European nation states.
It is, of
course, ludicrous folly. Look where toadying up to the White House got Theresa
May, dismissed by Trump this week in another of his Twitter-spews for having –
inexplicably – ignored his advice on how to leave the EU: ‘She went her own
foolish way – was unable to get it done. A disaster!’
Here is
the verdict of the Washington-based foreign policy analyst Thomas Wright of the
Brookings Institution, writing this week in The Atlantic: ‘Theresa May
did everything she could to accommodate Donald Trump. She was the first leader
to visit him after he became president. She offered him a state visit to the UK
at a much earlier stage in his tenure than his predecessors received one. She
uttered nary a word of criticism of his administration … Trump could not have
wished for a prime minister who was less demanding or more sycophantic … Trump
gave May nothing in return.’
So a Trump
sycophant in Downing Street is about to be replaced by a Trump acolyte. Our
only hope is that on both sides of the Atlantic, the nightmare will soon be
over.
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