Boris Johnson’s hypocrisy over Sir Kim Darroch

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/10/boris-johnson-hypocrisy-over-sir-kim-darroch

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Here we go again (Letters, 10 July). What the much misquoted Sir Henry Wotton, whose portrait used in my day to hang in the permanent under-secretary’s room, actually said in his aphorism (though without my added italics) was to define an ambassador as “an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”. But, living as he did in the 16th/17th centuries, he didn’t think it necessary to add, “Joke: lie abroad also means to live overseas.” It was only later, when he unwisely turned his witticism into a Latin version which lost the pun, that he ran into trouble, but the trouble was with his own King James, who took offence at even an imputation of deliberate dishonesty in his dealings with his fellow rulers.

As my wife expostulated at the breakfast table, even on the distorted version of Wotton, it’s the other side with whom you’re being less than candid, not your own. Wotton’s career later recovered, and ended in high regard. That fine public servant, Kim Darroch, deserved – and still deserves – the same.Frank BermanLegal adviser to the Foreign Office, 1991-99

• That some senior Conservatives, especially Boris Johnson, have sided with Donald Trump against Sir Kim Darroch, the just-resigned UK ambassador to the US, exposes the hypocrisy of the right’s claims to patriotism, and British independence post-Brexit. A Johnson premiership will surely see the UK become a vassal state, our policies increasingly determined by Washington.Pete DoreyBath, Somerset

• The leaking of the British ambassador’s emails which describe Trump as “radiating insecurity” unleashed a torrent of anti-British abuse on the President’s Twitter account. QED.Jane BarrettBuxton, Derbyshire

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