(Bloomberg) — The U.K. Foreign Office is investigating a leak of memos in which the British ambassador to the U.S. described President Donald Trump and his administration in unflattering terms, an official with the agency said.
Kim Darroch, a career diplomat who’s been his country’s top representative in Washington since 2016, described Trump as “inept” and “incompetent,” among other things, in diplomatic cables and briefing notes to his bosses, the Mail on Sunday reported.
Trump, speaking Sunday to reporters as he departed Morristown, New Jersey, for Washington, said “we’re not big fans of that man, and he has not served the U.K. well.” The president added that “I can say things about him but I won’t bother.”
Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who’s currently vying to become U.K. prime minister, sought to distance himself from the sentiment expressed in the ambassador’s cables, telling ITV News that Darroch had offered “a personal view.”
A Foreign Office spokeswoman earlier described the leaks as “mischievous behavior” and said that diplomats are paid to be candid.
The newspaper reported that Darroch described the current White House as “uniquely dysfunctional” and given to “knife fights.”
Darroch, 65, is a former national security adviser to the U.K. government.
In the memos, which were seen by the Mail on Sunday, Darroch didn’t rule out Trump being indebted to “dodgy Russians,” yet said that the president had frequently overcome a life “mired by scandal.”
Trump may “emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of ‘The Terminator,’” Darroch wrote, according to the newspaper. “Do not write him off.”
The leak comes after Trump traveled to the U.K. in early June to meet Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Theresa May, a visit in which he was treated to a state dinner. Darroch said Trump and his team had been “dazzled” by the pomp and circumstance surrounding the visit but remained self-interested.
The Foreign Office didn’t deny the accuracy of the memos. A spokeswoman said in a statement that “we pay them to be candid. Just as the U.S. ambassador here will send back his reading of Westminster politics and personalities.”
Hunt said Sunday that Darroch’s assessments were “not the views of the British government, they are not my views and we continue to think that under President Trump, the U.S. administration is not just highly effective, but the best possible friend of the United Kingdom on the international stage.”
The response to Darroch’s commentary cleaved along partisan lines. Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage, a close ally whom the president once said would make a “great” ambassador to the U.S., called the incumbent envoy “totally unsuitable for the job.”
“Experienced, capable and patriotic diplomats doing their jobs well by writing unvarnished analysis for their governments,” political scientist Ian Bremmer, head of Eurasia Group, said on Twitter. “Farage wants him sacked; he’d rather be lied to.”
(Updates with Trump comments in third paragraph.)
To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at [email protected];Kitty Donaldson in London at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at [email protected], ;Kevin Miller at [email protected], Mark Niquette
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