U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed a dim view of Sir Kim Darroch, the British ambassador who insulted him in leaked memos, while Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage has called for the diplomat’s removal.
“You know, we’ve had our little ins and outs with a couple of countries, and I’d say that the UK… the ambassador has not served the UK well, I can tell you that,” said the President in New Jersey, in response to the memos in which the career bureaucrat branded him “inept”, “insecure”, and “incompetent”, and suggested he may be in hock to “dodgy Russians”.
“We are not big fans of that man, and he has not served the UK well, so I can understand and I can say things about him, but I won’t bother,” the President added.
American sources said Sir Kim’s position was “not tenable” and that he had “simply made himself unfit to represent the British Crown and Downing Street”, given the memos “are replete with demonstrable falsehoods, which mean that no one will ever take ambassador Darroch seriously again.”
Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, who has built a strong relationship with President Trump — who, unlike predecessor Barack Obama, has been strongly supportive of Brexit and placed a high value on the British-American relationship, particularly as his late mother was British-born — described Sir Kim’s behaviour as “appalling” and called for him to be given his “marching orders”.
“I knew Darroch several years ago when he was our man in Brussels,” Farage recalled in a column for the Telegraph.
“Indeed, I recall one occasion when he came into my office and compromised himself in a rather devastating way… I said to him: ‘You’re a professional civil servant, aren’t you supposed to be neutral?’ He replied: ‘No. It’s our policy that the European Union is a good thing.’ I asked him to leave. I couldn’t see the point in even continuing to have the conversation.”
The veteran MEP suggested Sir Kim — as an EU loyalist clearly opposed to Trump doctrine — should never have been sent to Washington, and that the most damning characteristic of his “explosive comments” was that there were “not based in fact”.
“Darroch was not reporting back to London what was going on, as a professional ambassador would have done, but was instead advancing his own subjective opinions,” Farage pointed out.
“His guesswork about ‘dodgy Russians’ and his wild stab in the dark that Trump’s presidency might one day ‘crash and burn’ may have been eye-catching but these views are not remotely objective.”
President Trump once suggested that Farage, then in semi-retirement after his victory in the Brexit referendum, would do a “great job” as British ambassador himself, but the British government chose not to take advantage of his strong links with the American leader, insisting there was “no vacancy” for the position and that Sir Kim was an “excellent ambassador”.
Considering the damage the globalist bureaucrat has done to British-American relations, and the political threat Mr Farage now poses to the establishment parties with his return to frontline politics and victory in the recent EU elections with the Brexit Party, the British establishment may be regretting their decision.