Kim Darroch has resigned. Now Britain risks becoming a
vassal of the US
Martin Kettle
Donald Trump’s role in the Washington ambassador’s exit has
driven a stake through the heart of the UK’s postwar self-image
@martinkettle
Wed 10 Jul 2019 18.29 BST Last modified on Wed 10 Jul 2019
23.24 BST
Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian
The chief of Britain’s Foreign Office does nothing casually.
He is a past master at saying nothing unintended in public. So when the Foreign
Office permanent secretary, Simon McDonald, went before MPs this lunchtime
after the devastating resignation of Britain’s Washington ambassador, Kim
Darroch, his incisive directness was a revelation. It was the most eloquent
evidence possible that the Darroch affair is not just a diplomatic storm but an
existential challenge to Britain’s entire foreign policy.
What precedent was there, the foreign affairs committee
chair Tom Tugendhat asked McDonald straight off, for the head of state of a
friendly government to do what Donald Trump has done this week and make it
impossible for Britain’s senior representative in that country to do his job?
McDonald’s answer was monosyllabic, crisp and explosive. “None,” he said.
Labour’s Chris Bryant followed up. Surely there were
precedents from unfriendly countries such as Venezuela? “I know of none,”
McDonald replied again. Not even hostile states have behaved like Trump, he
insisted. Had there been some distant occasion when a British ambassador fell
foul of the White House in such a way? There was, McDonald admitted, a
“difficulty” in 1856, when President Franklin Pierce accused the British
ambassador of recruiting Americans to fight in the Crimean war. The listeners
in committee room 16 laughed, but McDonald did not.
And then came in many ways the most extraordinary remark of
the lot. “Nothing like this has ever happened before,” McDonald told another
MP. “There must be consequences. What they are in detail I can’t tell you this afternoon.”
I’ve known McDonald a long time. He was in the Washington
embassy when the Guardian posted me there during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Later, he worked for foreign secretary Jack Straw back in London. More recently
he has been Britain’s ambassador in Berlin and is an authoritative analyst of
German politics and policy. For the past four years he has been the head of the
diplomatic service in London.
McDonald is emphatically not an old-school British diplomat.
He is a bit of an outsider, modern, approachable and fiercely loyal to his
staff and colleagues. Getting a story out of McDonald is one of the hardest
journalistic tasks I have encountered. I’ve never heard him talk in public the
way he did yesterday. It tells you that this is really serious. He is not just
angry: he’s looking into the abyss into which the British postwar worldview is
sliding.
Darroch was brought down by three people. The first was the
leaker of successive critical memos from the Washington embassy, who gave them
to one of Britain’s most effective pro-Brexit journalists. The second was
President Trump, who followed up on the leaks with a fusillade of personal
insults and punitive actions of his own which brought Darroch to the brink. And
the third was Boris Johnson, who knowingly refused to express confidence in
Darroch during Tuesday’s ITV leadership hustings with Jeremy Hunt. It was
Johnson’s action that led directly to Darroch’s inevitable resignation today.
Each of these requires us to pause and digest the
implications. First, consider the leaker. This must have been either a senior
insider – a politician or diplomat – with access to highly classified material.
Alternatively, it may have been an outside job, a hack or intercept, possibly
by the agent of a state bent on mischief. Either way, these options are
devastating for the practicality of diplomatic cables in the modern era. They
are a reminder too of the extent to which Brexit subverts the workings of the
British state. There’s been nothing like it for alternative loyalty since the
Soviet spies of the cold-war era.
Second, consider Trump. He didn’t have to turbo-charge the
leak. He will have had some around him who tried to stop him. But he did it
once, and then he did it again. These were 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; an attempt to fire and hire Britain’s envoy.
It was 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. For Britain, though, it is a stake through
the heart of its entire postwar self-image.
Finally, consider Johnson. Though he has mainly been in
hiding while the Brexiters’ coup against Theresa May works itself through the
Tory party to his benefit, Johnson’s ITV debate exposed once again a politician
who can rival Trump for self-centred and ruthless opportunism. Tuesday reminded
us that, in Johnson’s world, other people are always expendable. Ask the former
London police chief Ian Blair, sacked by Johnson in one of the most disgraceful
acts of his mayoralty. Ask Iran’s prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, innocent
victim of Johnson’s lazy mind and incontinent tongue. Now ask Darroch, whom
Johnson casually hung out to dry. Each of them simply got in the way. If
Johnson becomes prime minister there will be more, much more, of this.
In the end, though, the Darroch affair is not just about
personalities but more importantly about policy. For the past three years,
British ministers from May down have tried to treat Trump as a temporary
difficulty to work around with a pretence of friendship while deeper
institutional links and common interests with America endure. Once Trump goes,
they believe, the reset button can quickly be pushed to return to the status
quo ante of supposedly special relations.
Yet it is increasingly hard to take this view seriously. Too
much is changing on too many fronts. Trumpism may not be temporary. He may well
be re-elected next year (as Darroch himself pointed out in a memo). The
underpinnings of Trumpism, in the shape of populist nationalism and contempt
for other countries, alliances and accords, go much deeper, both in the US and
in Brexit Britain. If Johnson, or any other Brexiter leader, gets his way,
Britain may once again embrace the US. But the America they embrace will not be
the outward-looking republic of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama but an
inward-looking exceptionalist country that seeks to disrupt everything about
the international order. In such a world, Britain risks becoming the vassal of
a capricious unilateralist state. Johnson or his successor would be Britain’s
Carrie Lam to Washington’s Xi Jinping.
This is a new world. There are no precedents. Britain’s
postwar belief that it is a unique bridge between Europe and the US is more
rickety now than ever. The Brexiters are set on destroying one end of the
bridge. Trump is equally bent on blowing up the other. As the bridge begins to
collapse, so does the transatlantic foreign policy that Darroch and others have
battled so hard to sustain. As Simon McDonald put it today to the foreign
affairs committee, there will be consequences. There certainly will. And none
will be good ones.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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