British ambassador to Washington has been betrayed

Alas poor Kim Darroch he has been undone. Her Majesty's ambassador to Washington has been betrayed by some snivelling civil servant or minister who for some reason wanted to humiliate the ambassador and undermine the relationship between Britain and the United States. Sir Kim's confidential and restricted emails to London giving his personal reflections on the Trump administration - not at all complimentary - have been leaked to the Mail on Sunday and they made hay with it. In reality Sir Kim's reflections pretty well echoed what everyone else has been saying about the Trump administration in Washington - inept, chaotic, lacking any form of coordination or predictabiliy. But to have his words splashed all over a Sunday newspaper is so embarrassing that I can't see Sir Kim being allowed to stay much longer in his post. Trump has already dismissed him by saying he hadn't served his country very well. Oops! Can you imagine Sir Kim sitting in his plush office at the UK embassy in DC or at his exceptionally comfortable and palatial residence and watching the president of the United States hailing bim as a failed ambassador? I don't know Sir Kim that well but I have come across him quite a lot in the past as a journalist when he was based at the Foreign Office in London and he always seemed to me to be the perfect diplomat: calm and charming and pleasant and a good bloke, and very knowledgeable. He doesn't deserve to be betrayed by some pathetic individual who thought it would be fun to hand over the confidential emails to a female journalist who he/she knew would make huge headlines with such a story. Sir Kim, the Foreign Office says, is due to leave his post in a couple of months, so that's all right then. But actually he had hoped to stay on until the next presidential election in late 2020. I doubt that will happen now and when he leaves, all anyone will remember is how he made contemptuous comments about Trump. Thanks to the leaker and to the Mail on Sunday. I don't blame the newspaper. It's difficult to reject such juicy morsels when they are handed to you on a plate. But I wonder if the paper thought for a moment about the potential impact such a story would have on the career of a very nice British diplomat? Sir Kim was once director of press at the Foreign Office. So I guess he won't have been surprised by the way the Mail on Sunday treated the story. But he must fear that Trump will now have nothing to do with him. It's a cruel world. What if he had written confidential emails saying Trump was probably the best president in America's history? Would the Mail on Sunday have given them the same treatment? No, Sir Kim would probably have been criticised as a deluded toady. You can't win, Kim.