Sir Kim Darroch resigns as UK ambassador to US

[krtek a houby]

All the toadying by Johnson to keep his new master happy really puts the special relationship back in the spotlight.

 

[Poi E]

They are generally cordial people who 'get on' with whichever countries governments. They still cut through the crap and give straight talking feedback. And sometimes they need to be direct and forthright.

I'd love to know what other countries ambassadors are saying about the UK these days.

"What the fuck" from a senior NZ civil servant I know well.

 

[JuanTwoThree]

I'm all for honesty in communications. But it is worth considering the information you are honestly conveying. If it's something you can honestly stand by and back up, it's not a problem whatever it is. People get embarrassed, though, when they've said something that isn't really "honest" in the sense of being impartial, evidenced fact. It's just honestly held polemic. But there is no value in such polemic. If that's all you have to offer, and you're going to be embarrassed by its revelation there's no real meat to support it, then just don't say it in any kind of official format.

On this occasion, the honestly held opinion he was honestly conveying was something born of upper class privilege, public school bluster and contempt of the oiks. He chose to honestly convey this honest opinion and it bit him because it was of no value.

The emails that the mail chose were the ones that had Darroch saying "What a ghastly vulgar man!" and sounding just as you say. But are there more leaked emails with real dirt and some facts?

 

[krtek a houby]

Trump strikes a blow for class war by having a nob fired. Who'd a thunk it?

 

[kabbes]

The emails that the mail chose were the ones that had Darroch saying "What a ghastly vulgar man!" and sounding just as you say. But are there more leaked emails with real dirt and some facts?

Does it matter? The reason the Mail printed the ones they chose was because those were the embarrassing ones. If all he had reported was unedited and factual, they would have been a lot less interesting to print and caused little fall-out even if they had plenty of dirt.

 

[mauvais]

The emails that the mail chose were the ones that had Darroch saying "What a ghastly vulgar man!" and sounding just as you say. But are there more leaked emails with real dirt and some facts?

The one I saw reported was about how the Trump administration isn't likely to become more coherent, less inept etc.

This absolutely is of value, if the state intends to spend any kind of capital on the premise that things will improve. Which it apparently has and does.

 

[kabbes]

The one I saw reported was about how the Trump administration isn't likely to become more coherent, less inept etc.

This absolutely is of value, if the state intends to spend any kind of capital on the premise that things will improve. Which it apparently has and does.

At the very least, it will change in either 1 year or 5 years. I hope we’re not setting long term strategic investment on the basis of what might be just a single year’s time horizon.

 

[Pickman's model]

At the very least, it will change in either 1 year or 5 years. I hope we’re not setting long term strategic investment on the basis of what might be just a single year’s time horizon.

the use of the phrase time horizon is far more offensive than the use of inept

 

[editor]

Everyone agrees, it seems

Foreign ambassadors working in Washington have revealed they share similar views to British envoy Sir Kim Darroch, who described Donald Trump’s administration as “inept” and “dysfunctional” in leaked diplomatic cables.

“It could have been any of us,” one unnamed ambassador told the New York Times.

Asked if other members of the Washington diplomatic corps characterised the Trump White House as chaotic, former French Ambassador to the US Gérard Araud, who retired earlier this year, said: “Yes, yes, everyone does.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/ambassadors-we-all-share-similar-views-on-donald-trump-to-sir-kim-darroch-a4187586.html

 

[Ming]

Well the cops have launched a criminal investigation.
Sir Kim Darroch: Police launch probe into Trump email 'leak' Police launch probe of ambassador emails 'leak'
What i don’t get is you’d think these diplomatic communications would be pretty comprehensively monitored. And access and storage would be state of the art. And tracked. So why haven’t MI5 already found the culprit?

 

[existentialist]

Well the cops have launched a criminal investigation.
Sir Kim Darroch: Police launch probe into Trump email 'leak' Police launch probe of ambassador emails 'leak'
What i don’t get is you’d think these diplomatic communications would be pretty comprehensively monitored. And access and storage would be state of the art. And tracked. So why haven’t MI5 already found the culprit?

Maybe they have. But they may not want it to be known, if it doesn't have to be, HOW they've found the culprit. So get them to confess, or have the police "investigate" and happen across a smoking gun that MI5 doesn't have to admit to holding...

 

[Ming]

Maybe they have. But they may not want it to be known, if it doesn't have to be, HOW they've found the culprit. So get them to confess, or have the police "investigate" and happen across a smoking gun that MI5 doesn't have to admit to holding...

Hmm. Smoke and mirrors with the spooks innit.

 

[existentialist]

Hmm. Smoke and mirrors with the spooks innit.

It's what they do best

 

[Ming]

It's what they do best

Spooks gotta’ spook.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Well the cops have launched a criminal investigation.
Sir Kim Darroch: Police launch probe into Trump email 'leak' Police launch probe of ambassador emails 'leak'
What i don’t get is you’d think these diplomatic communications would be pretty comprehensively monitored. And access and storage would be state of the art. And tracked. So why haven’t MI5 already found the culprit?

Ehrm, this is the same ‘establishment’ that has been running Brexit to it’s special tune, yeah?

Or perhaps we have reached peak nepotistic and it may be a time for people with actual intelligence and talent to have a pop at sorting shit out? Whacky, I know.

 

[Ming]

Ehrm, this is the same ‘establishment’ that has been running Brexit to it’s special tune, yeah?

Or perhaps we have reached peak nepotistic and it may be a time for people with actual intelligence and talent to have a pop at sorting shit out? Whacky, I know.

Well have a look at Robert Mercer (involved in Trump/Brexit) and then get back to me on whether we have a right wing international group bent on breaking up the post war consensus.

 

[Mr Moose]

Ehrm, this is the same ‘establishment’ that has been running Brexit to it’s special tune, yeah?

Or perhaps we have reached peak nepotistic and it may be a time for people with actual intelligence and talent to have a pop at sorting shit out? Whacky, I know.

Who are these people with ‘actual intelligence’? Where are they to come from at the point Boris Johnson is about to become PM? I’m all ears.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

Who are these people with ‘actual intelligence’? Where are they to come from at the point Boris Johnson is about to become PM? I’m all ears.

Would you not make a better job of it than the shower of shit currently on offer?

 

[Mr Moose]

Would you not make a better job of it than the shower of shit currently on offer?

Fair enough, I thought for a moment you felt someone better was likely to takeover.

 

[SpineyNorman]

... a right wing international group bent on breaking up the post war consensus.

They're about 40 years too late to that show.

 

[tim]

On this occasion, the honestly held opinion he was honestly conveying was something born of upper class privilege, public school bluster and contempt of the oiks. He chose to honestly convey this honest opinion and it bit him because it was of no value.

As a kid from a council estate with a scholarship to a public school, I assume that Darroch was more likely to have been the token oik. Trump is clearly from much more of an elite background that Darroch, even if British snobs might not see it that way.

 

[tim]

Is Tommy Robinson available for the gig?

Theresa May will be available. She could win favour by helping the President with all those pesky stairs

 

[elbows]

Ehrm, this is the same ‘establishment’ that has been running Brexit to it’s special tune, yeah?

Or perhaps we have reached peak nepotistic and it may be a time for people with actual intelligence and talent to have a pop at sorting shit out? Whacky, I know.

Funnily enough I was reading this again the other day. 2013 Adam Curtis blog post about the wacky swivel-eyed shit history of MI5. As usual with Curtis it doesnt cover every angle and reaches simplistic conclusions, but plenty of fun detail.

BUGGER

It reminded me that when I was talking about secure channels and leaks not being the norm, and making reference to other recent leaks, that I had not acknowledged the various other sorts of leaks that are far more routine.

Here is Chapman Pincher being interviewed on the Wogan programme about what then happened. Up to this point Pincher had been the Defence correspondent on the Daily Express. He was successful for getting "scoops" from "inside sources" - although the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was:

"A kind of official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking."

What the dissident MI5 agents now told Pincher was like super high-grade piss. Or, as he puts it in the Wogan interview, "it was like walking into an Aladdin's Cave". But what Pincher wrote was going to open the floodgates to a new kind of conspiracy journalism that still holds sway over large parts of the media imagination.

Its not hard to construct the same sort of story Curtis does about MI5 and the spy games of the past, especially growing up in the 1980s and seeing a lot of this stuff (often without much context) in the news at the time. I do wonder what the situation is like these days. I wonder how much it still has in common with what Le Carre described.....

It was an image that was powerfully helped by John Le Carre's novels - and his anti-hero George Smiley. Le Carre's novels were a clever piece of PR - because they appeared to be more gritty and realistic than the glamourised James Bond image.

But it was just another layer of deception - because Smiley and his search for a hidden mole expressed powerfully the paranoid and unfounded fantasies of the dissident MI5 agents.

But it was a world that was all made-up. Le Carre - who had himself been a spy - admitted this, and described what the true reality of the spy world was:

"For a while you wondered whether the fools were pretending to be fools as some kind of deception, or whether there was a real efficient service somewhere else.

Later in my fiction, I invented one.

But alas the reality was the mediocrity. Ex-colonial policemen mingling with failed academics, failed lawyers, failed missionaries and failed debutantes gave our canteen the amorphous quality of an Old School outing on the Orient express. Everyone seemed to smell of failure."

Anyway I know this is somewhat of an aside but for some reason something you said reminded me of that final quote

 

[Poi E]

Anyway, to the British elite consuming itself over Brexit. Isabelle Euphemia Oakeshott versus some other posh twat. No dog in that fight.

 

[Lurdan]

Mirror points out Isabel Oakeshott is currently in a relationship with Richard Tice, Chair of the Brexit Party and one of its MEPs. Or as the Sunday Times puts it

Oakeshott, who was political editor of The Sunday Times until 2014, now straddles journalism and political activism.

Times also reports, and picked up in the Guardian

“They think they know who did the leaking,” an unnamed government source told the paper. “It’s now a case of building a case that will stand up in court. It was someone with access to historical files. They went in and grabbed a range of material. It was quite crude.”

Mail publishes more by Oakeshott.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

And we have Asst Commissioner Neil Basu threatening the media with prosecution if they publish these leaked documents. MoS ignored the mad twat.

 

[Old Spark]

So who is your money on as the leaker ? Could be Williamson acting on behalf of Johnson or the Hunt camp - tho can't see what either would gain.

Could be May and number 10 getting back at Trump but would they sacrifice the ambassador.

No ,likeliest is its a Brexit party operation -Oakeshott is in a relationship with Richard Tice so they must have a mole at very senior level in FO or No10 tho May could have fed the pigeons i suppose.Motive presumably to get Farage into Ambassador job under Johnson.

Meanwhile in the Peoples Party our brave whistleblowers are consulting m'learned friend after the Stalinists in Loto were rather uncomradely about their revelations.Len called Watson a fucking disgrace at the gala yesterday-only five years ago they were flatmates and mates-didn't Watson employ Karie Murphy.??

Our politics is in a desperate state-choice of the main parties is as attractive as trying to chose whether Saville or Glitter would teach your kids best.

Head for the hills.

 

[Dogsauce]

How recent are the events detailed in the leaks? Don’t think I’ve heard anything particularly recent. I’m wondering if the leaks are old material, leaked in the past rather than now, and the motive for publishing now might be to get the leaker into trouble, perhaps if it was someone associated with the Jonnson or Hunt camp.