Mr. Luce begins his homily on ‘The Splintering of the West’ presided over by the Know-Nothing Trump, with the full co-operation of an utterly bankrupt Republican party, and The New Democrats dragging their feet, in reply to this political enfant terrible’s tantrums, with this comment on Kim Darroch’s resignation:

Spare little pity for Kim Darroch, Britain’s outgoing ambassador to the US. He leaves Washington with plaudits from fellow diplomats and will enjoy life after the Foreign Office. It is rare that someone whose career has been terminated so abruptly emerges with an improved reputation.

Craig Murray actually worked for/with Amb. Darroch and offer insights that put Mr. Luce’s comments on the ambassador … Luce is too busy engaging in a pseudo-Hegelian   World-Historical Political Metaphysics of Crisis , ‘The Splintering of the West’, to attend to less pressing, mundane questions:

…

Darroch’s scathing assessment of Trump is no way out of line with the mainstream media narrative and it is interesting – but exactly what I would expect of him – that Darroch shares the neo-con assumption that Trump’s failure to start a war with Iran over the drone take-down was a weird aberration. The leaks neither tell us anything startling nor obviously benefit any political faction in the U.K. So what was the motive?

…

Kim Darroch is a rude and aggressive person, who is not pleasant at all to his subordinates. He rose to prominence within the FCO under New Labour at a time when right wing, pro-Israel foreign policy views and support for the Iraq War were important assets to career progress, as was the adoption of a strange “laddish” culture led from No. 10 by Alastair Campbell, press secretary of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. This culture involved swearing, football shirts and pretending to be working class (Darroch was privately educated). Macho management was suddenly the thing.

At a time when news management was the be all and end all for the Blair administration, Darroch was in charge of the FCO’s media department. I remember being astonished when, down the telephone, he called me “******* stupid” for disagreeing with him on some minor policy matter. I had simply never come across that kind of aggression in the FCO before. People who worked directly for him had to put up with this kind of thing all the time.

…

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/10/the-simple-explanation-for-the-betrayal-of-britains-envoy/

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/f58b0e62-a370-11e9-a282-2df48f366f7d

@Dr Wu @Ed Luce, FT

Thank you both for your comments. It is always a pleasure to comment on my, almost favorite, Posh Boy Luce, the selection, here at @FT , is extensive. Since I write polemics my hyperbole:

Luce is too busy engaging in a pseudo-Hegelian World-Historical Political Metaphysics of Crisis , ‘The Splintering of the West’, to attend to less pressing, mundane questions:

Should be taken in the spirit that it is given. Mr. Luce’s idée fixe on ‘The West’ as under attack from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea invites a burlesque, framed by the reliably gaseous Hegelian vocabulary. ‘The West’ has been busy over centuries creating/cultivating its own enemies. The pose of moral/political virtue – history can’t mitigate this self-serving fiction?

What publication, I’ve given up on The Economist, that seems to have forgotten what it once was, would publish my comments, that exist on the rhetorical plane of  ‘… to speak frankly, you are spectacularly full of crap.’ ? Mr. Luce agrees with your comment, the power of one lone dissident voice, to evoke a single word of assent to your comment …

Trump is about a rebellion against the whole of the American Political Class: the toxicity you point to is about the whole of that class, not just the Republicans.

Craig Murray’s comments on  Kim Darroch are not ‘gossip’ as you characterize them, but a report on his personal interactions with the ambassador. The insights offered by Murray are valuable in that they place Darroch squarely in the vulgarizing world of New Labour:

Kim Darroch is a rude and aggressive person, who is not pleasant at all to his subordinates. He rose to prominence within the FCO under New Labour at a time when right wing, pro-Israel foreign policy views and support for the Iraq War were important assets to career progress, as was the adoption of a strange “laddish” culture led from No. 10 by Alastair Campbell, press secretary of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. This culture involved swearing, football shirts and pretending to be working class (Darroch was privately educated). Macho management was suddenly the thing.

Darroch is not some virtuous figure brought low by Trump, as Murray points out. The leaks are probably the work of a subordinate, who had simply had enough of Darroch’s insufferable arrogance!

Best regards,

StephenKMackSD