The leaks were wrong... Sir Kim Darroch was not

The guilty parties should be named and shamed – or self-censoring might overwhelm diplomatic correspondence

Sir Kim’s observations are commonplace and nowhere near as shocking as the two books by Michael Wolff about life in the White House (Getty)

They’re unprofessional, they’re unethical, and they’re unpatriotic.

So says Liam Fox, who, for a change, is right. His verdict on whoever leaked candid emails from the British ambassador in Washington is that they are, to adapt a trendy turn of phrase, a stone cold villain.

The international trade secretary, in Washington for vital pre-talks on a prospective US-UK trade deal, feels more acutely than most the damaging effect the emails must be having on the “special relationship”. President Trump, notoriously thin-skinned, says Sir Kim Darroch has not served the UK well. This is harsh, if predictable.

Sir Kim has every right, as other ambassadors and high commissioners do, to tell it as he sees it, and not to tailor his judgements according to what the recipients (intended or otherwise) might wish to hear. You would expect America’s representative at the Court of St James’s to make similarly honest observations about the condition of the United Kingdom. They might not be so complimentary now, and with understandable reason.

They need not be prescient. One of the most prominent of US ambassadors, Joe Kennedy, father of Jack, reported to President Roosevelt during the war that the British had little chance against the might of Nazi Germany. Many patriotic but dispirited Britons might have shared his pessimism in the summer of 1940.

By historical contrast, British diplomats in Berlin as war approached in 1939 were still telling the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, that Hitler was sincere, that appeasement was working, and that Hitler had no intention of starting a world war. They did so because it was what No 10 wished to hear, and Chamberlain filtered out unhelpful intelligence reports in the same spirit of wilful ignorance. It did not, shall we say, serve the UK well. Honesty, politely expressed, in diplomacy is most often the best policy.

If Sir Kim was entitled to say what he said – accurate or not – then so was the Mail on Sunday justified in publishing it. No matters of state security were compromised, and, although they are embarrassing, the revelations will probably do no lasting harm, especially as Sir Kim is moving towards the end of his term of office.

Theresa May has reassured the Americans that the British do not think their government is “dysfunctional” and their leader “inept” – something she will have had to do with the straightest face she can muster in the circumstances. Any media organisation would have gleefully accepted the scoop, even though, in truth, Sir Kim’s observations are commonplace, and nowhere near as shocking as, for example, the two books by Michael Wolff about life in the White House.

The fault, then, is in the leaking, and the inquiry into who did it is important because of the self-censoring that might start to overwhelm diplomatic correspondence if those guilty parties are not at least named and shamed. The emails were current in the first part of 2017, when Boris Johnson was foreign secretary, though this may be entirely coincidental. It is too much to believe that it is part of some mad Machiavellian plot to devalue Sir Kim and, still more bizarrely, slot Nigel Farage into some sort of quasi-diplomatic role (as President Trump has suggested apparently in all seriousness). The timing, though, coming at the end of the Tory leadership contest when most of the ballots have already been returned, is intriguing.

Although Sir Kim’s remarks were made some years before he was due to retire, the tradition of frank valedictory tours d’horizon by diplomats is a long and entertaining one. They usually make for lively reading. In 1979, the British general election campaign was energised by the leak of Sir Nicholas Henderson’s farewell from Paris, which laid out in cringe-making detail the decline of the UK to become the sick man of Europe.

Only this year, Her Majesty’s high commissioner to Singapore, Scott Wightman, lamented how low post-Brexit Britain’s reputation was sinking, with an admirable sense of history. He likened Brexit’s impact to the disastrous fall of the supposedly invincible stronghold of Singapore to a relatively small Japanese force in 1942, which showed the “complacency and arrogance of colonial leadership … It transformed their view of British imperialism. Things were never the same again. The last three years have done the same for Singaporeans’ view of contemporary Britain.”

This is not to say that the diplomats always get it right, and their essays sometimes make for better “colour” journalism than austere disinterested analysis, but the policymakers back in London would be the poorer for them pulling their punches. Given their usually forceful personalities, it seems, on balance, unlikely to keep them from the odd undiplomatic indiscretion.