British Ambassador to the US Kim Darroch, who earlier questioned President Trump’s competency in leaked cables to the Foreign Office, was disinvited from a Monday dinner hosted by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Bloomberg quoted an unnamed White House official as saying.
The official said that the dinner was attended by US President Donald Trump and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.
The remarks were preceded by Trump pledging that Washington “will no longer deal with” Darroch over his unfriendly remarks about the US president.
“I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US”, Trump tweeted on Monday.
May’s Downing Street office, in turn, underlined that while the leak is unfortunate, “Kim Darroch continues to have the Prime Minister [Theresa May]’s full support".
Earlier on Monday, British Foreign Minister Jeremy Hunt expressed concern over Darroch’s leaked cables to the Foreign Office, in which the ambassador, in particular, called Trump “inept”, “insecure”, and “incompetent”.
Voicing his disagreement with Darroch’s assessments, Hunt specifically emphasised that “what we will not allow to happen is any interruption in the superb relationship that we have with the United States, which is our closest ally around the world”.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman James Slack, for his part, vowed that “strong” UK-US ties will continue despite the leaks. He added that police would only interfere in a probe led by civil servants in the Cabinet Office “if evidence of criminality is found”.
International Trade Minister Liam Fox, in turn, described the leak as “malicious”, pledging to apologise to the US President's daughter Ivanka Trump for the fact that standards of “either our civil service or elements of our political class” had “lapsed in a most extraordinary and unacceptable way”.
His comments came after Trump said that “we are not big fans of that man [Darroch] and he has not served the UK well”.
“[…] So I can understand it and I can say things about him but I won't bother”, he added.
First published by the newspaper Daily Mail on Saturday and then confirmed by London, the cables specifically said that Trump was “uniquely dysfunctional and his career could end in disgrace”. In the cables, Ambassador Darroch also described Trump’s conflicts within the administration as “knife fights”.
“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”, the ambassador said in one memo.