Former Ambassador Says Sir Kim Darroch Was Just Doing His Job

8 July 2019, 20:06 | Updated: 9 July 2019, 06:58

Former Acting US Ambassador to Great Britain Lewis Lukens told LBC that Sir Kim Darroch was "just doing his job."

When Iain Dale asked the former diplomat if it "surprised" him that an Ambassador would say such things in a dispatch to his government, Mr Lukens said it didn't.

A leak of diplomatic messages from the British ambassador in America revealed Sir Kim Darroch described the Trump administration as "inept."

The former State Department official said that the real story was "not so much the content of these letters and messages to London, it's the leak that exposed all of it."

He told Iain Dale that "Sir Kim was doing what he's paid to do" Mr Lukens said, adding it was Sir Kim's job to "report honestly and frankly on the situation in Washington.

"Including the personalities involved at the leadership level. And that's what he was doing."

The former Ambassador, who worked for months under the Trump administration, said that the revelations from Sir Kim's memos were not a surprise to "anyone who's watched the White House and Washington for the last two years."

Mr Lukens said that the Trump White House had "chaos, dysfunctionality" and "incoherence on the policy side."  

When he was asked if he had "written things like this" back to the US government while he was a diplomat in the UK, Mr Lukens said he had, adding "there has been lots of interesting material to write about here in London over the last three years."

Watch the whole exchange in the video at the top of the page, or click here to read President Trump's response to the memo leak.