President Trump on Monday announced the United States would no longer deal with the British ambassador to the U.S., Sir Kim Darroch, after memos he wrote disparaging the president and his cabinet leaked to the media on Sunday.
“I have been very critical about the way the U.K. and Prime Minister Theresa May handled Brexit. What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way,” Trump tweeted.
“I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the U.S. We will no longer deal with him,” he said.
However, he had kind words to say about the Queen, following a recent trip to the U.K.
“The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister. While I thoroughly enjoyed the magnificent State Visit last month, it was the Queen who I was most impressed with!”
The Daily Mail revealed in a bombshell report on Sunday that Darroch, in secret cables sent to a number of senior officials at Downing Street and the Foreign Office, in the summer of 2017 accused Trump of “radiating insecurity,” filling his speeches with “false claims and invented statistics” and achieving “almost nothing” in terms of domestic policy.
He also wrote: “As seen from here, we really don’t believe that this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction-riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”
He also made recommendations on how London could influence the Trump administration.
“It’s important to ‘flood the zone’: you want as many as possible of those who Trump consults to give him the same answer,” he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “So we need to be creative in using all the channels available to us through our relationships with his Cabinet, the White House staff, and our contacts among his outside friends.”
He also recommended Prime Minister Theresa May call Trump more often, and for British officials to flatter Trump.
Trump first responded to the cables on Sunday when asked by reporters. He said that Darroch “has not served the U.K. well” and “we’re not big fans of that man.”
“I can say things about him, but I won’t bother,” he added.
The leak has sent the British government scrambling to shore up their relationship with the U.S.
May’s spokesman said she does not agree with Darroch’s assessment, and that the leak was “absolutely unacceptable,” according to the BBC.
“The leak is absolutely unacceptable and, as you would expect, contact has been made with the Trump administration setting out our view that we believe that it is unacceptable,” he said.
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