It’s Kim Darroch’s job to be frank about Trump – let’s hope the US ambassador returns the favour when Brexit destroys us

It will be difficult to find many foreign diplomats in Washington who did not share most, if not all, of Kim Darroch’s views about the Trump administration.

And it is not just representatives of other nations. As frequent and explosive leaks to the media, and in a number of books, have revealed, former and current White House staff, American military and the intelligence services have been caustic – far more so than Darroch – about this extraordinary and toxic presidency.

Some of these views have been expressed in public and some, like Darroch’s, in private. Her Majesty’s ambassador to the United States was doing, in his confidential dispatches, what British heads of mission are supposed to do: give the government back home a frank assessment of an administration whose actions impact so much on the UK and the rest of the world.

American diplomats also, of course, make similar reports from where they are stationed.

Publication by WikiLeaks of confidential US diplomatic cables revealed that Afghan president Hamid Karzai, then the partner in what turned out to be the longest war in American history, was described as “paranoid”. In France, former president Nicolas Sarkozy was “authoritarian” and an “emperor with no clothes”. Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd was a “control freak” and, in Britain, Gordon Brown “had an abysmal track record” which led him from political “disaster to disaster”.

And these were just the cables about America’s allies, let alone enemies.

But what has been markedly noticeable under Trump is just how openly American diplomats have started to interfere in the internal politics of other countries.

For instance, Richard Grenfell, the US ambassador to Germany, told the London branch of the far-right news network Breitbart (run by political allies of Nigel Farage) that he wanted to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe”. This was seen as a direct threat to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition and the foreign ministry in Berlin demanded a clarification.

David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, told a newspaper in the country that “there’s no question Republicans support Israel more than Democrats”; a claim not only not backed up by evidence, but a partisan one of the type that ambassadors are not supposed to make.

They were not the only ones. In the Netherlands, the US ambassador Peter Hoekstra at first refused to back down about claims he had made that politicians in the country had their cars burned by Muslims. He did, however, later apologise.

Viewed in this broader context, was what Darroch said about the Trump administration shocking, or even surprising? Particularly when we bear in mind that his task as an ambassador is to try and present as accurate a picture as possible of the people in power where he is based.

The ambassador had talked about bitter internal divisions and incompetence in Washington. And we know that this US administration had seen the biggest churn in recent American history, with an astonishing number of departures just in the first 12 months.

Many of the partings have left bitter legacies, as can be seen, for example, in the description by Steve Bannon, once the president’s chief strategist, of Ivanka Trump as “dumb as a brick”. Bannon also described the meeting of Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner with a group of Russians in Trump Tower as “treasonous”.

Darroch had suggested that Trump’s career may end in disgrace. Is that such a remote possibility? This is a president whose first years in office laboured under the dark cloud of Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether he was the Muscovian candidate for the White House. A president whose national security adviser, campaign manager and personal lawyer were all indicted and convicted by the special counsel: a president who may yet be impeached by congress and who is still facing 16 different investigations.

Darroch criticises the US administration over its attempts to sabotage the Iran nuclear deal. But that criticism has been made publicly by the UK government and other signatories to the agreement – Germany, France, Russia and China as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – who all stress that the agreement is working, and that Tehran is living by its obligations.

The British ambassador is sceptical of Trump’s claim that he stopped the airstrikes ordered after the shooting down of a US drone on Iran, minutes from them taking place, because a general, unnamed, told him that 150 people would be killed.

The scepticism about Trump’s account is widely shared by countless American, British and European officials. The widely held view is that Trump is not a war president and that he resisted being dragged into a conflict by hawks in his administration such as national security adviser John Bolton, who like Trump is a Vietnam draft dodger, but unlike the president has been a serial advocate of military action abroad.

The fact that Trump appears to be averse to a war with Iran is widely considered a good thing: Darroch was not implying that it was not.

In the end, the leak of the British ambassador’s internal emails is the result of British internal politics. It is early days, but there is little doubt in Whitehall that it was leaked to promote the cause of Brexit and to try to get a hardline Brexiteer into the job of US ambassador in Washington. The finger inevitably points to Nigel Farage, who has long been touting himself as a candidate.

Trump said that Darroch “has not served the UK well”. In reality he was serving the UK entirely well in presenting his view, confidentially, of the US political scene. That is exactly what the current American ambassador to London would be doing in his dispatches about the chaos and fractured political landscape of Brexitland and the opportunities this presents to the US.

The real risk of the UK being ill-served will come from an ambassador who fails to send a transparent, candid account of what is happening in Washington because of ideological reasons, such as adherence, for example, to the jihad of hardline, doctrinaire Brexit.