deeply worrying time

It's a shame the person responsible for deliberately leaking confidential emails cannot be named and shamed.

Kim Darroch is unfortunately an embarrassment right now, and like him or not, President Trump has every reason to be angry at the contents of the leaked documents. Darroch's position as Ambassador became untenable, given his publicised thoughts regarding the POTUS.

To my mind the quicker this rather awkward situation is resolved, the better. I think his resignation is appropriate.

From the Guardian

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/10/kim-darroch-resigns-as-uk-ambassador-to-us-after-leaked-trump-comment

“People are shaken by what has happened and there is a reason why I have asked to see all my colleagues,” he said. “The basis on which we have worked all our careers suddenly feels challenged.”

"McDonald, the head of the Diplomatic Service, said that police were now involved in the inquiry, and added that attention would be focused on recipients of highly sensitive emails that were in some cases sent to as few as five or 10 people."

I do hope the 'grass' who leaked Darroch's confidential thoughts is found and hung out to dry. The way in which diplomats work is seriously compromised if they are surrounded by traitors.

Darrick has done absolutely nothing wrong.

This is disgusting. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Every ambassador from any country that ever there was has sent back home reports to their governments similar to those Sir Kim Darroch sent the Foreign Secretary..

Just think what the reports the US ambassador (and every other ambassador acredited to the Court of St Jame's) is sending back to Washington say about our dysfunctional government.

If the US government under Donald Trump were not everything Kim Darroch described, the whole thing would have been dealt with diplomatically, wooly statements from each government and forgotten in a week.

It is because the incumbent of the White House is a bear of very little brain and a drama queen combined in one that this issue has become so difficult.

I suspect that things like this have happened before quite a lot. Ambassadoring and diplomacy are sticky wickets and I'm sure there have been embarassments aplenty but perhaps they are more difficult to keep hush-hush in these days of fast and furious communications.

The biggest embarrassment in this whole sorry saga is that sorry excuse for a human being in the White House. Hope my language was diplomatic enough

Yes remember all the information that was leaked about America and their ambassadors assessment of various government leaders?

I don’t recall anyone throwing their toys out of the pram then.

Jonathan Lis
@jonlis1

This is not just the worst day for British diplomacy in many years, but the most dangerous. Ambassadors are now pawns in a nationalist culture war which seeks to break every democratic British institution, one by one. If we don’t end this, it will end us.

Yvette Cooper
@YvetteCooperMP

Appalling it has come to this. Kim Darroch is a serious & honourable public servant who was doing his job. British representation across the world should not be decided by hostile security leaks or bullying belligerence from abroad

suzie...I think you are being too diplomatic ?

I really hope they find the ‘leaker’ soon.

Most American Presidents wouldn't even have commented I think, but allow it to blow over.

Glad to see that May and Hunt supported the BA, but Johnson really wouldn’t, and considering he is in line to be PM soon, I suppose the BA thought why carry on until Christmas.

Just by the way, there's a picture of Kim Darroch in the Times alongside Boris Johnson. Johnson looks almost small next to Darroch, which surprised me as I'd always thought BJ was quite a big man (not that I've ever seen him in the flesh). So I'm thinking Darroch must be huge.

I don't think it is a recent photo because they are wearing poppies and, even allowing for the long Poppy Day overspill that occurs now, it's a bit early.

He was retiring at Christmas anyway.

He could hardly have covered the next six months now all that has come out into the open. Trump doesn't want to play with him anymore.

Can't say I'm that worried about it.

Interesting times though.

I’m surprised at how strongly I feel about wanting this leaker to be identified and boiled in oil - sorry- punished appropriately. I think it’s because there is no identified public interest in publishing this story - just identified damage. My husband has just reminded me that the journalist involved was she of Cameron and the pig’s head.

That journalist tried to bury the information about Farage and the Russians. It is obvious where her sympathies lie

Sorry I meant to type ‘journalist’

The responsibility for this diplomatic incident lies with the people who leaked the confidential information, the journalist who accrued it, the paper which published it, and the type of person who encourages this type of activity by trying to make political capital out of it.

Just listening to the totally impartial BBC trying to blame Boris Johnson for the ambassador's resignation.

The ambassador sent the emails, therefore he, however unfairly, has accepted responsibility, because he knows how to behave.

The BBC aren’t blaming Johnson, Darroch indicated that Johnson had disgracefully refused to give him support. The BBC were merely reporting that fact.

There are a whole raft of people laying it at Johnson’s feet and the BBC are just repeating that. It’s called news.

No one who was not involved in the process knows how the British ambassador to the United States’ confidential and critical memos about Donald Trump came to be in the hands of the Brexit Party’s in-house journalist, Isabel Oakeshott.

Without such knowledge, all anyone can do is speculate on the motivations and machinations behind the deliberate humiliation of one of the UK’s most senior and most respected civil servants, Sir Kim Darroch, for the crime of doing his job.

The most plausible, and thus the most repeated explanation, is that a Brexiteer with a high-ranking position within government, or a special adviser similarly inclined, has leaked the information to undermine both Sir Kim, an ardent Remainer, and perhaps to prevent Sir Mark Sedwill, the current cabinet secretary and most senior civil servant in the country, from replacing him.

Leaks are not uncommon, even major ones like this. But traditionally, they are done by Whitehall officials, or party rivals, to damage politicians. Rarely, if ever before, are they done with the express intention of damaging the civil service.

The Brexit fire is out of control. It is coming for reason, and it is coming for the truth. It is two and a half years since the UK’s ambassador to the European Union, Sir Ivan Rogers, resigned. When he did so, he told his Whitehall colleagues they must carry on having the courage to tell politicians the truth, even if it is a truth they do not wish to hear. Sir Ivan was, and is, the country’s leading expert on the internal politics of the European Union. Theresa May and her associates decided they did not need his advice.

Olly Robbins, the civil servant whom Theresa May appointed to lead her Brexit team inside No 10, has for several years done his civil service job amid outrageous attacks from the more rabidly pro-Brexit press, encouraged by Nigel Farage, Leave.EU and all the rest of the Eurosceptic faction that Vote Leave chief Dominic Cummings once referred to as “the flying monkeys”.

Robbins is now departing for the private sector.

High court judges with the temerity to interpret the law on whether parliament must be consulted before the triggering of Article 50 were labelled “enemies of the people” by the Daily Mail.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-civil-service-darroch-oakeshott-sedwill-a8995596.html