UK's Ambassador Craig Murray on Britain's Rude Ambassador to the US

Craig Murray, formerly one of the brightest lights of Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), has a simple explanation for the embarrassing leak of comments about Donald Trump and his administration by Britain's ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch. Basically, he argues, Darroch is a jerk, and someone saw an opportunity for pay-back.

Kim Darroch is a rude and aggressive person, who is not pleasant at all to his subordinates. He rose to prominence within the FCO under New Labour at a time when right wing, pro-Israel foreign policy views and support for the Iraq War were important assets to career progress, as was the adoption of a strange “laddish” culture led from No. 10 by Alastair Campbell, involving swearing, football shirts and pretending to be working class (Darroch was privately educated). Macho management was suddenly the thing. At a time when news management was the be all and end all for the Blair administration, Darroch was in charge of the FCO’s Media Department. I remember being astonished when, down the telephone, he called me “fucking stupid” for disagreeing with him on some minor policy matter. I had simply never come across that kind of aggression in the FCO before. People who worked directly for him had to put up with this kind of thing all the time. Most senior ambassadors used to have interests like Chinese literature and Shostakovitch. Darroch’s are squash and sailing. He is a bull of a man. In my view, the most likely source of the leaks is a former subordinate taking revenge for years of bullying, or a present one trying to get rid of an unpleasant boss. Read the entire post

To which Craig Murray subsequently added his reaction to the reaction of those who argue that the resignation of Kim Darroch was the result of an attack on an apolitical civil service:

"Darroch’s rise to the top of the FCO" Murray writes:

... was in fact a startling example of the politicisation of the civil service – there is no doubt that his enthusiastic support for the Iraq War, and for every neo-con war of aggression since, is what endeared him so strongly to the people who make the decisions on the top posts (and do not believe the fiction that ministers have no influence on them). ... Read the entire post