LONDON - Britain's Ambassador to Washington has described Donald Trump as 'inept', 'insecure' and 'incompetent' in a series of explosive memos to Downing Street.
Sir Kim Darroch, one of Britain's top diplomats, used secret cables and briefing notes to impugn Trump's character, warning London that the White House was 'uniquely dysfunctional' and that the President's career could end in 'disgrace'.
His bombshell comments risk angering the notoriously thin-skinned President and undermining the UK's 'special relationship' with America.
In one of the most sensitive documents, Sir Kim writes: 'We don't really believe this Administration is going to become substantially more normal; less dysfunctional; less unpredictable; less faction riven; less diplomatically clumsy and inept.'
He also says that he doesn't think Trump's White House will 'ever look competent'.
In reference to Trump's ability to shrug off controversies in a life which has been 'mired in scandal', he says that the President may nonetheless 'emerge from the flames, battered but intact, like [Arnold] Schwarzenegger in the final scenes of The Terminator'.
He warns senior politicians in London: 'Do not write him off.'
The leak is embarrassingly timed for the British Government, coming just weeks after the Queen welcomed Trump and his family with a 41-gun salute and a State banquet at Buckingham Palace as part of a diplomatic drive to secure a post-Brexit free-trade deal.
In a memo sent after the visit, Sir Kim warned that while Trump and his team had been 'dazzled' by the visit, and the UK might be 'flavour of the month', Trump's White House remained self-interested: 'This is still the land of America First'.
The Washington Files span the period from 2017 to the present, covering everything from Trump's policy in the Middle East to his 2020 re-election plans.
One account of a Trump rally says that there is a 'credible path' for Trump to win a second term in the White House – but describes the crowd as 'almost exclusively white'.
In what is likely to be regarded as a patronising passage in the cache, officials in London are told that in order to deal with Trump effectively 'you need to make your points simple, even blunt'.
The most incendiary paper is a letter to National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill sent on June 22, 2017 – 150 days into the Trump administration – and copied to what Sir Kim describes as a 'strictly limited' number of senior figures in Downing Street and the Foreign Office.(FA)
Trump 'inept' and 'clumsy', UK envoy
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