COLLATERAL DAMAGE EB

Kim Darroch

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008411572
• eBook ISBN: 9780008411596
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

'Much bigger and more ambitious than a first-person "rise and fall" … Great vignettes and classy analysis from the man who until a year ago sat at the top of the diplomatic tree … There is nothing dusty or dry in his account of dealing with the twin forces of Boris and Donald, and how they've shaped politics – and his life' Guardian

@realDonaldTrump: 'The wacky ambassador that the UK foisted on the United States is not someone we are thrilled with, a very stupid guy … We will no longer deal with him'

Kim Darroch was British Ambassador to the US as the age of Trump dawned and Brexit unfolded. One of the UK's most experienced and respected diplomats, to Darroch was given the task of explaining Trump to the British and Brexit to the Americans. Choosing to resign after his confidential cables criticising the Trump administration were leaked to the press, Darroch's unvarnished, behind-the-scenes account reveals for the first time the inside story of this tumultuous time and reflects more broadly on Britain's relationship with the United States. In a book rich in anecdote and insight, he describes the challenges of dealing with the Trump White House; and offers a diplomat's perspective on Brexit and how it looked to Britain's closest ally.

As the closest Brit to the story, Darroch explains why the British embassy suspected a Trump victory from as early as February 2016, what part every key figure – from Sarah Sanders to Michael Flynn – has played in Trump's administration, and what balanced policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic should consider during this era of pandemic, seismic change and populist politics.

With riveting insider detail, Collateral Damage charts the strangest and most convulsive period in the recent history of Britain and the US – and the state of the 'special relationship' today.

1

Leaks and Tweets

*

‘It’s going to be a rough few days, Ambassador, but we’ll get through this’

– the embassy media team, 5 July 2019

*

‘WE’VE GOT a problem. There’s been a leak.’

I looked at my chief of staff, poised in the doorway to my office. Normally a picture of unflappable calm and command, she looked anxious. The embassy media team were hovering just behind her.

It was Friday 5 July 2019, the day after US Independence Day: the embassy was half empty, with many staff away for a long weekend. And it was a typical summer’s day in the Swamp: hot, humid, soupy. As usual, the air conditioning, perfect in the rest of the building, wasn’t quite cutting it in my office; a consequence, I supposed, of inhabiting the largest space in the building. I was just seven days away from going on leave myself, to the refuge of our cottage in Cornwall and three weeks of messing around in sailing boats. My wife, Vanessa, would be returning to the UK that evening, to catch up with her 96-year-old mother. And I felt like I needed a break too, but not just to escape the heat. Being ambassador in Washington had always been a seven days a week, fifteen hours a day job. But even by these standards it had been a draining period: the President’s state visit to London, a succession of British ministers and parliamentarians in town, a speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, a visit to Montana, and on the Washington circuit, a multiplicity of events every night at which attendance was obligatory – all against the background of the resignation of the British Prime Minister Theresa May and the competition to succeed her.

The words ‘there’s been a leak’ were ones I had heard regularly during my time in Washington. They usually related to the porous state of the plumbing and guttering in the outwardly majestic ambassadorial residence next door. Indeed, a bucket was permanently stationed in the corner of the master bedroom, there to catch the contents of Washington’s occasional fierce cloudbursts. But it was instantly clear to me that this was a different kind of leak. The media team told me that the Mail on Sunday had tipped off one of the Foreign Secretary’s special advisers that they had a stash of communications from the Washington embassy to Whitehall. The newspaper had sportingly provided a handful of screenshots of individual pages, prompting a bizarre parlour game: how quickly could we identify the full documents from the pages provided? We passed the test: within an hour, we knew, with one exception, what they had.

The senior team assembled around my conference table. Copies of the leaked texts were handed around. The Mail on Sunday were telling our London colleagues that they had a lot of material, more than twenty-five pages. The three documents we had identified were cables (diptels – diplomatic telegrams, in Foreign Office jargon) from the previous three weeks: on the state visit, on President Trump’s 2020 campaign launch, and on US policy on Iran. These were sensitive but on a quick skim, I reckoned the blowback should be manageable. But they came to considerably less than twenty-plus pages: so what else did the Mail have?

The detective work continued. Bewilderingly, judging by the screenshot, the remaining text was from 2017, two years earlier, and was a letter, not a cable. Cables usually had a wide circulation, in the hundreds: letters generally had more sensitive content and a much smaller readership. So the letter format alone was worrying. As was the fact of the long gap between this and the other documents, suggesting that someone had been curating my output for years, and selecting the most combustible material.

The minutes ticked past. My concerns mounted. While those around the table continued to chew over the leaks already identified, one of my private office team, at her desk immediately outside my office, scrolled through the document archive. I heard the photocopier whirring before she emerged with a sheaf of copies in her hand.

The remaining leak was a confidential letter from me to Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary and national security adviser, dating back to mid-2017. This had been written as input for a top-level discussion of UK-US relations, some six months into the new US administration. My mood sank. This was really bad.

The National Security Council had been created by David Cameron and William Hague when the coalition government took office in 2010, in part as a reaction to claims that the previous government had decided to go to war in Iraq without proper consultation of senior cabinet ministers. As national security adviser from 2012 to 2015, I had organised its work. So when I wrote that letter in 2017, I had known what was required: a frank, unvarnished assessment of the Trump administration, seven months into office.

The letter had provided exactly that. Given its sensitivity, it had gone to a very small number of people in Whitehall. It had described the infighting inside the White House chronicled daily by the US media, drawing on dozens of sources inside the building. It had summarised the policy missteps, especially the executive orders banning travel from several Muslim countries, a measure quickly blocked in the US courts. It had highlighted the damaged relationships with NATO allies, in the wake of President Trump picking fights with many of them at a NATO summit, as well as hinting that he didn’t agree with the cornerstone of the alliance, Article 5, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. And it had assessed the growing cloud of scandal swirling around the administration, centred on accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian state. The letter had also, however, highlighted his killer instinct for the vulnerabilities of his opponents; his Teflon qualities; and his extraordinary empathy with his political base, who treated him less as a politician, more as a messiah. But I immediately doubted that these more positive comments would be given any prominence in the media.

I remembered that one of my predecessors, my close friend Nigel Sheinwald, had gone through a comparable experience when a less than totally flattering letter he had written about Barack Obama’s qualities as a presidential candidate had leaked to a (different) newspaper. Nigel had survived. Obama’s team had declined to respond to the leak. Was there any chance that the Trump White House might behave similarly? I had my doubts.

I returned briefly to the residence over lunchtime, for a meeting with a personal trainer with whom I was signing up: a specialist in dealing with chronic back pain. We agreed a schedule of appointments through to November, though I warned her – I hoped in jest – that I might be out on the street by Monday. She looked bemused.

The rest of the day was a rolling series of meetings. Sometimes stories take the government by surprise. But when there is some warning, the media machine swings into pre-emptive action. The aim is to produce a succinct, objective, calm, and factually correct text which presents government policy in the best possible light, and to which everyone sticks, whether sitting in No. 10, a Whitehall outpost, or an embassy thousands of miles away. And if, as is usually the case with stories involving the Foreign Office, another country is involved, the Holy Grail is a press line which the relevant foreign government has also agreed to use.

So my team talked to London and agreed some press lines. My media team telephoned the White House to warn them of the impending story. We had good relations with the White House press office, and they responded reassuringly, promising that they wouldn’t react and would try to play the whole thing down. I then phoned the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was a good friend, to tip him off personally on what was about to unfold. Mick, too, was reassuring: ‘This stuff happens to us every day.’ But he added, ominously and, it turned out, presciently, that he couldn’t predict how the President would react. The media team, drawing on their conversations with the White House, told me they thought it would be rough, ‘but we’ll get through it’.

On which note I took Vanessa to Dulles Airport to catch her flight to London. The generous Virgin team in Washington usually let us use their business lounge, even though we generally flew in economy. So we had a cheerful hour over cocktails, looking forward to swapping the Washington sweatbox for some honest Cornish rain. Not wanting to put her on edge, I mentioned casually that there might be a brief flurry in the Sunday papers about a leak from the Washington embassy: it would blow over …

Saturday was an agony of waiting for the British Sunday papers to hit the streets. The hours crawled past, each one more sluggish than its predecessor. Earlier in my career, I had been head of News Department and FCO spokesman. Every couple of months, I would accompany the then secretary of state, Robin Cook, to one of the Sunday morning political shows. I would need to brief him on the contents of the Sunday papers – which involved going to the newsstand outside Victoria Station at about 11 p.m. on Saturday to buy all the first editions. Nowadays, one would go online. But the image of the Victoria Station newsstand remained lodged in my mind. I whiled away the hours playing tennis, going for a swim, watching a Washington Nationals baseball game on TV. But I kept visualising the bundles of newsprint hitting the pavement – one of which would determine my future.

Around 5 p.m. Washington time, announced by a vibrating mobile phone, the first Mail on Sunday article landed in my email inbox. The first of several: it turned out that the newspaper had filled most of its first five pages with extracts from my reporting. And the reality – the screenshots of the pages – looked, well, terrible. As I had expected, on the front page at least, they had highlighted the criticisms – words like ‘inept’ and ‘deeply dysfunctional’, together with the comment that the administration, already mired in scandal, could be at the beginning of a downward spiral leading to disgrace. I had said that the President ‘radiated insecurity’. Further in, the lead article had highlighted one particular sentence: ‘We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.’

It wasn’t all like that. At one point, underlining Trump’s talent for eviscerating his opponents and his seeming indestructibility, I had likened him to that figure from Eighties cinema, the Terminator. The reference featured briefly in the inside pages. So did my judgement that, notwithstanding the administration’s performance to date, there was a credible path for Trump to win a second term. But how many readers would reach the inside pages?

And there was a piece about me. Parts of it looked like a cut-and-paste reworking of a friendly Financial Times profile from a few months earlier. The piece observed in apparent wonder that I had been brought up in a council flat in Abingdon, Oxfordshire while attending Abingdon School, at that stage a direct grant establishment, now a fully fledged public school of some repute. I couldn’t object to this: it was true (though my father, were he alive, would have pointed out that it was only for three to four years, while he saved to buy a house). Other parts were more questionable. The article asserted that I was a rabid Europhile, simply on the basis that I had twice worked in Brussels in the UK representation to the European Union, the second time as ambassador. But in mitigation, it asserted that at the same time I was deeply patriotic, on the grounds that the protective case for my mobile phone featured a Union Jack. Ye shall know them by their phone cases.

So overall, it was about as bad as it could be; a template for despondency rather than relief. Notwithstanding it being Saturday night, the story went immediately to the top of the UK media, leading all the bulletins. The embassy press secretary who had drawn the short straw of weekend press duty was besieged. So were her counterparts in Whitehall. The line was straightforward: ‘We don’t comment on leaks; ambassadors are paid to be candid and offer an honest unvarnished assessment of developments in their host countries.’

That Saturday night, the US media didn’t really catch up. But we knew it was coming. And by Sunday morning, though it had broken too late for the US newspapers, it was leading most of the US news channels and spiralling across social media: top on both sides of the Pond. I got a mid-morning phone call from Vanessa, who sounded shocked. She said she had been woken by her mother at 7 a.m. with the words: ‘You have to come and look at the television! Kim is all over the news.’

It is difficult to convey how the next few hours felt. There were moments when I was overwhelmed with dread at how the White House would react. I knew the President was spending the weekend at his New Jersey golf club. I could imagine him coming into the locker room after his round, there to meet some faceless adviser, who would pour poison into his ear about what the British ambassador had written, and then stand back and watch this notoriously thin-skinned individual erupt. There were minutes when I thought back on my years of public service and wondered what kind of a mark this would leave on my record. Was this to be how it ended? And there were more reflective moments when I thought to myself … that I had finally fallen off the tightrope. Particularly in the second half of my career, I had done some high-profile jobs – Foreign Office press spokesman, Europe adviser to the Prime Minister, ambassador to the European Union, national security adviser – in which I had carried out large-scale press briefings or appeared before parliamentary committees. The objective, at these moments, had been twofold: convey government policy accurately and persuasively; and avoid yourself becoming the story. There had been breaches – I had been named in a few articles. And during my time in Brussels, some Eurosceptic MPs and MEPs had attacked me publicly, apparently for just being in the job (I used to joke that I understood how the scientists, engineers and officials attacked during Stalin’s Great Purge must have felt). But on the whole, and thanks to a large measure of luck, I had stayed on the tightrope and got away with it – until the 2019 weekend from hell.

In practical terms, it was another day of rolling meetings. The weekend notwithstanding, the embassy team gathered in the upstairs flat in the residence. We monitored the three main cable news channels, checking for nuances of difference in the coverage. I was fed regular updates from the FCO and No. 10 on how the story was playing in the UK. So there was intense activity all around me. But personally, I felt increasingly numb and detached. It was an out-of-body experience, in which I floated above the scene, disconnected from the mayhem unfolding below. Was this really all about me? Would I wake up in an hour and discover, like Bobby Ewing in Dallas, that it was all a dream? And everyone in the room knew that this was just the prologue: what counted was what the occupant of the White House would say.

The dread was justified. The President arrived back from New Jersey by helicopter, landing on the White House lawn late that Sunday afternoon. As was the tradition, a group from the White House press corps were waiting to fire questions at him. And inevitably, one of the first was about his reactions to the leaks of my report. The President said, ‘The ambassador has not served the UK well, I can tell you that. We are not big fans of that man.’

My immediate thought was that, if this was it, it was survivable. Having escaped for a few hours in the late afternoon, the media and political teams returned that evening for a round-up of events and took the same view: it could have been worse. And Sunday night came and went without further comment from the White House. But I had always expected it to be a reckoning by Twitter; the President habitually saved his most personal attacks, and his most savage language, for his morning Twitter feed, his direct channel to his base.

And so it proved. On Monday morning, the President tweeted, ‘I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US. We will no longer deal with him.’ He then mysteriously digressed into an attack on the Prime Minister: ‘What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way. The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.’

As I read ‘We will no longer deal with him’, it flashed instantly through my mind that it was all over. But I didn’t, at that moment, pursue the thought: with new information coming on stream at every moment, there was no space to think things through. No. 10 were saying that I continued to have the Prime Minister’s full support. The Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, also issued a statement saying that he supported me, while adding that he didn’t fully agree with my assessment. This qualification was something of a blow, but understandable: in my days as a press spokesman, I would have advised the Foreign Secretary to say exactly that for the sake of the relationship between the US and the UK. The British media were speculating on where former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson MP stood on the issue, given that he was hot favourite to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister.

And out of the blue, there was an emergency debate about me in the House of Commons. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat MP, had put down an urgent question on the leaks of reporting from Washington. The minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Sir Alan Duncan (another close personal friend, I should declare), made a characteristically forthright statement in defence of me while also insisting on the importance of diplomats worldwide being able to report freely and frankly. The Hansard report of the subsequent debate, which I read a few hours after it took place, provided a reassuring picture of near complete support.

But what remained in my mind, of course, were the handful of dissenting views. There had been a furious intervention in the debate from Sir Bill Cash MP, who described my ‘toxic attacks on the US President’ as ‘completely unjustified’, adding that as chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee he was ‘more than well aware of my prejudices’. (To give his remarks some context, I had appeared before his committee several times in my EU days, tasked with explaining and defending government EU policy: he has no more knowledge of my personal views or ‘prejudices’ on anything than he has of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.) And for good measure, Dominic Raab MP, a former cabinet minister and one of the unsuccessful candidates for the Conservative leadership, said on Newsnight that I was wrong to have included ‘personalised remarks’ in my confidential reporting; while also perplexingly arguing that, by contrast, for Boris Johnson to say publicly, while mayor of London, that Donald Trump was ‘stupefyingly ignorant’ was completely fine.

The team also kept me updated on the war on social media: I was apparently well ahead on body count. One comment in particular caught my eye. Mia Farrow, icon of 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Leaks and Tweets
• 2. Off and Then On Again
• 3. Discovering ‘Real America’
• 4. Snowzilla
• 5. The Brexit Vote
• 6. The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump
• 7. Fear and Loathing in Washington
• 8. Loose in Trump Tower
• 9. American Carnage
• 10. Theresa May Meets Donald Trump
• 11. ‘No Collusion, No Obstruction’
• 12. The Conduct of the Presidency
• 13. Foreign Policy and Trade
• 14. Domestic Policy: Obamacare, Tax Reform and Immigration
• 15. UK–US Relations: Brexit, Blenheim and the State Visit
• 16. Resignation, Part Two
• 17. The Great Unravelling: Brexit, Trump and the Eclipse of Establishment Politics
• 18. What Happened Next
• Afterword
• List of Illustrations
• Picture Section
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Publisher