COLLATERAL DAMAGE
Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump
Kim Darroch

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020

Copyright © Kim Darroch 2020

Cover design by Steve Leard

Cover photographs © Getty Images

Kim Darroch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008411572

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008411596

Version: 2020-08-19

Dedication

To Vanessa, to whom I owe it all

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Leaks and Tweets

2 Off and Then On Again

3 Discovering ‘Real America’

4 Snowzilla

5 The Brexit Vote

6 The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump

7 Fear and Loathing in Washington

8 Loose in Trump Tower

9 American Carnage

10 Theresa May Meets Donald Trump

11 ‘No Collusion, No Obstruction’

12 The Conduct of the Presidency

13 Foreign Policy and Trade

14 Domestic Policy: Obamacare, Tax Reform and Immigration

15 UK–US Relations: Brexit, Blenheim and the State Visit

16 Resignation, Part Two

17 The Great Unravelling: Brexit, Trump and the Eclipse of Establishment Politics

18 What Happened Next

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

1
Leaks and Tweets

*

‘It’s going to be a rough few days, Ambassador, but we’ll get through this’

– the embassy media team, 5 July 2019

*

‘WE’VE GOT a problem. There’s been a leak.’

I looked at my chief of staff, poised in the doorway to my office. Normally a picture of unflappable calm and command, she looked anxious. The embassy media team were hovering just behind her.

It was Friday 5 July 2019, the day after US Independence Day: the embassy was half empty, with many staff away for a long weekend. And it was a typical summer’s day in the Swamp: hot, humid, soupy. As usual, the air conditioning, perfect in the rest of the building, wasn’t quite cutting it in my office; a consequence, I supposed, of inhabiting the largest space in the building. I was just seven days away from going on leave myself, to the refuge of our cottage in Cornwall and three weeks of messing around in sailing boats. My wife, Vanessa, would be returning to the UK that evening, to catch up with her 96-year-old mother. And I felt like I needed a break too, but not just to escape the heat. Being ambassador in Washington had always been a seven days a week, fifteen hours a day job. But even by these standards it had been a draining period: the President’s state visit to London, a succession of British ministers and parliamentarians in town, a speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival, a visit to Montana, and on the Washington circuit, a multiplicity of events every night at which attendance was obligatory – all against the background of the resignation of the British Prime Minister Theresa May and the competition to succeed her.

The words ‘there’s been a leak’ were ones I had heard regularly during my time in Washington. They usually related to the porous state of the plumbing and guttering in the outwardly majestic ambassadorial residence next door. Indeed, a bucket was permanently stationed in the corner of the master bedroom, there to catch the contents of Washington’s occasional fierce cloudbursts. But it was instantly clear to me that this was a different kind of leak. The media team told me that the Mail on Sunday had tipped off one of the Foreign Secretary’s special advisers that they had a stash of communications from the Washington embassy to Whitehall. The newspaper had sportingly provided a handful of screenshots of individual pages, prompting a bizarre parlour game: how quickly could we identify the full documents from the pages provided? We passed the test: within an hour, we knew, with one exception, what they had.

The senior team assembled around my conference table. Copies of the leaked texts were handed around. The Mail on Sunday were telling our London colleagues that they had a lot of material, more than twenty-five pages. The three documents we had identified were cables (diptels – diplomatic telegrams, in Foreign Office jargon) from the previous three weeks: on the state visit, on President Trump’s 2020 campaign launch, and on US policy on Iran. These were sensitive but on a quick skim, I reckoned the blowback should be manageable. But they came to considerably less than twenty-plus pages: so what else did the Mail have?

The detective work continued. Bewilderingly, judging by the screenshot, the remaining text was from 2017, two years earlier, and was a letter, not a cable. Cables usually had a wide circulation, in the hundreds: letters generally had more sensitive content and a much smaller readership. So the letter format alone was worrying. As was the fact of the long gap between this and the other documents, suggesting that someone had been curating my output for years, and selecting the most combustible material.

The minutes ticked past. My concerns mounted. While those around the table continued to chew over the leaks already identified, one of my private office team, at her desk immediately outside my office, scrolled through the document archive. I heard the photocopier whirring before she emerged with a sheaf of copies in her hand.

The remaining leak was a confidential letter from me to Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary and national security adviser, dating back to mid-2017. This had been written as input for a top-level discussion of UK-US relations, some six months into the new US administration. My mood sank. This was really bad.

The National Security Council had been created by David Cameron and William Hague when the coalition government took office in 2010, in part as a reaction to claims that the previous government had decided to go to war in Iraq without proper consultation of senior cabinet ministers. As national security adviser from 2012 to 2015, I had organised its work. So when I wrote that letter in 2017, I had known what was required: a frank, unvarnished assessment of the Trump administration, seven months into office.

The letter had provided exactly that. Given its sensitivity, it had gone to a very small number of people in Whitehall. It had described the infighting inside the White House chronicled daily by the US media, drawing on dozens of sources inside the building. It had summarised the policy missteps, especially the executive orders banning travel from several Muslim countries, a measure quickly blocked in the US courts. It had highlighted the damaged relationships with NATO allies, in the wake of President Trump picking fights with many of them at a NATO summit, as well as hinting that he didn’t agree with the cornerstone of the alliance, Article 5, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. And it had assessed the growing cloud of scandal swirling around the administration, centred on accusations of collusion between the Trump campaign and agents of the Russian state. The letter had also, however, highlighted his killer instinct for the vulnerabilities of his opponents; his Teflon qualities; and his extraordinary empathy with his political base, who treated him less as a politician, more as a messiah. But I immediately doubted that these more positive comments would be given any prominence in the media.

I remembered that one of my predecessors, my close friend Nigel Sheinwald, had gone through a comparable experience when a less than totally flattering letter he had written about Barack Obama’s qualities as a presidential candidate had leaked to a (different) newspaper. Nigel had survived. Obama’s team had declined to respond to the leak. Was there any chance that the Trump White House might behave similarly? I had my doubts.

I returned briefly to the residence over lunchtime, for a meeting with a personal trainer with whom I was signing up: a specialist in dealing with chronic back pain. We agreed a schedule of appointments through to November, though I warned her – I hoped in jest – that I might be out on the street by Monday. She looked bemused.

The rest of the day was a rolling series of meetings. Sometimes stories take the government by surprise. But when there is some warning, the media machine swings into pre-emptive action. The aim is to produce a succinct, objective, calm, and factually correct text which presents government policy in the best possible light, and to which everyone sticks, whether sitting in No. 10, a Whitehall outpost, or an embassy thousands of miles away. And if, as is usually the case with stories involving the Foreign Office, another country is involved, the Holy Grail is a press line which the relevant foreign government has also agreed to use.

So my team talked to London and agreed some press lines. My media team telephoned the White House to warn them of the impending story. We had good relations with the White House press office, and they responded reassuringly, promising that they wouldn’t react and would try to play the whole thing down. I then phoned the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who was a good friend, to tip him off personally on what was about to unfold. Mick, too, was reassuring: ‘This stuff happens to us every day.’ But he added, ominously and, it turned out, presciently, that he couldn’t predict how the President would react. The media team, drawing on their conversations with the White House, told me they thought it would be rough, ‘but we’ll get through it’.

On which note I took Vanessa to Dulles Airport to catch her flight to London. The generous Virgin team in Washington usually let us use their business lounge, even though we generally flew in economy. So we had a cheerful hour over cocktails, looking forward to swapping the Washington sweatbox for some honest Cornish rain. Not wanting to put her on edge, I mentioned casually that there might be a brief flurry in the Sunday papers about a leak from the Washington embassy: it would blow over …

Saturday was an agony of waiting for the British Sunday papers to hit the streets. The hours crawled past, each one more sluggish than its predecessor. Earlier in my career, I had been head of News Department and FCO spokesman. Every couple of months, I would accompany the then secretary of state, Robin Cook, to one of the Sunday morning political shows. I would need to brief him on the contents of the Sunday papers – which involved going to the newsstand outside Victoria Station at about 11 p.m. on Saturday to buy all the first editions. Nowadays, one would go online. But the image of the Victoria Station newsstand remained lodged in my mind. I whiled away the hours playing tennis, going for a swim, watching a Washington Nationals baseball game on TV. But I kept visualising the bundles of newsprint hitting the pavement – one of which would determine my future.

Around 5 p.m. Washington time, announced by a vibrating mobile phone, the first Mail on Sunday article landed in my email inbox. The first of several: it turned out that the newspaper had filled most of its first five pages with extracts from my reporting. And the reality – the screenshots of the pages – looked, well, terrible. As I had expected, on the front page at least, they had highlighted the criticisms – words like ‘inept’ and ‘deeply dysfunctional’, together with the comment that the administration, already mired in scandal, could be at the beginning of a downward spiral leading to disgrace. I had said that the President ‘radiated insecurity’. Further in, the lead article had highlighted one particular sentence: ‘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.’

It wasn’t all like that. At one point, underlining Trump’s talent for eviscerating his opponents and his seeming indestructibility, I had likened him to that figure from Eighties cinema, the Terminator. The reference featured briefly in the inside pages. So did my judgement that, notwithstanding the administration’s performance to date, there was a credible path for Trump to win a second term. But how many readers would reach the inside pages?

And there was a piece about me. Parts of it looked like a cut-and-paste reworking of a friendly Financial Times profile from a few months earlier. The piece observed in apparent wonder that I had been brought up in a council flat in Abingdon, Oxfordshire while attending Abingdon School, at that stage a direct grant establishment, now a fully fledged public school of some repute. I couldn’t object to this: it was true (though my father, were he alive, would have pointed out that it was only for three to four years, while he saved to buy a house). Other parts were more questionable. The article asserted that I was a rabid Europhile, simply on the basis that I had twice worked in Brussels in the UK representation to the European Union, the second time as ambassador. But in mitigation, it asserted that at the same time I was deeply patriotic, on the grounds that the protective case for my mobile phone featured a Union Jack. Ye shall know them by their phone cases.

So overall, it was about as bad as it could be; a template for despondency rather than relief. Notwithstanding it being Saturday night, the story went immediately to the top of the UK media, leading all the bulletins. The embassy press secretary who had drawn the short straw of weekend press duty was besieged. So were her counterparts in Whitehall. The line was straightforward: ‘We don’t comment on leaks; ambassadors are paid to be candid and offer an honest unvarnished assessment of developments in their host countries.’

That Saturday night, the US media didn’t really catch up. But we knew it was coming. And by Sunday morning, though it had broken too late for the US newspapers, it was leading most of the US news channels and spiralling across social media: top on both sides of the Pond. I got a mid-morning phone call from Vanessa, who sounded shocked. She said she had been woken by her mother at 7 a.m. with the words: ‘You have to come and look at the television! Kim is all over the news.’

It is difficult to convey how the next few hours felt. There were moments when I was overwhelmed with dread at how the White House would react. I knew the President was spending the weekend at his New Jersey golf club. I could imagine him coming into the locker room after his round, there to meet some faceless adviser, who would pour poison into his ear about what the British ambassador had written, and then stand back and watch this notoriously thin-skinned individual erupt. There were minutes when I thought back on my years of public service and wondered what kind of a mark this would leave on my record. Was this to be how it ended? And there were more reflective moments when I thought to myself … that I had finally fallen off the tightrope. Particularly in the second half of my career, I had done some high-profile jobs – Foreign Office press spokesman, Europe adviser to the Prime Minister, ambassador to the European Union, national security adviser – in which I had carried out large-scale press briefings or appeared before parliamentary committees. The objective, at these moments, had been twofold: convey government policy accurately and persuasively; and avoid yourself becoming the story. There had been breaches – I had been named in a few articles. And during my time in Brussels, some Eurosceptic MPs and MEPs had attacked me publicly, apparently for just being in the job (I used to joke that I understood how the scientists, engineers and officials attacked during Stalin’s Great Purge must have felt). But on the whole, and thanks to a large measure of luck, I had stayed on the tightrope and got away with it – until the 2019 weekend from hell.

In practical terms, it was another day of rolling meetings. The weekend notwithstanding, the embassy team gathered in the upstairs flat in the residence. We monitored the three main cable news channels, checking for nuances of difference in the coverage. I was fed regular updates from the FCO and No. 10 on how the story was playing in the UK. So there was intense activity all around me. But personally, I felt increasingly numb and detached. It was an out-of-body experience, in which I floated above the scene, disconnected from the mayhem unfolding below. Was this really all about me? Would I wake up in an hour and discover, like Bobby Ewing in Dallas, that it was all a dream? And everyone in the room knew that this was just the prologue: what counted was what the occupant of the White House would say.

The dread was justified. The President arrived back from New Jersey by helicopter, landing on the White House lawn late that Sunday afternoon. As was the tradition, a group from the White House press corps were waiting to fire questions at him. And inevitably, one of the first was about his reactions to the leaks of my report. The President said, ‘The ambassador has not served the UK well, I can tell you that. We are not big fans of that man.’

My immediate thought was that, if this was it, it was survivable. Having escaped for a few hours in the late afternoon, the media and political teams returned that evening for a round-up of events and took the same view: it could have been worse. And Sunday night came and went without further comment from the White House. But I had always expected it to be a reckoning by Twitter; the President habitually saved his most personal attacks, and his most savage language, for his morning Twitter feed, his direct channel to his base.

And so it proved. On Monday morning, the President tweeted, ‘I do not know the Ambassador, but he is not liked or well thought of within the US. We will no longer deal with him.’ He then mysteriously digressed into an attack on the Prime Minister: ‘What a mess she and her representatives have created. I told her how it should be done, but she decided to go another way. The good news for the wonderful United Kingdom is that they will soon have a new Prime Minister.’

As I read ‘We will no longer deal with him’, it flashed instantly through my mind that it was all over. But I didn’t, at that moment, pursue the thought: with new information coming on stream at every moment, there was no space to think things through. No. 10 were saying that I continued to have the Prime Minister’s full support. The Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, also issued a statement saying that he supported me, while adding that he didn’t fully agree with my assessment. This qualification was something of a blow, but understandable: in my days as a press spokesman, I would have advised the Foreign Secretary to say exactly that for the sake of the relationship between the US and the UK. The British media were speculating on where former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson MP stood on the issue, given that he was hot favourite to succeed Theresa May as Prime Minister.

And out of the blue, there was an emergency debate about me in the House of Commons. The chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugendhat MP, had put down an urgent question on the leaks of reporting from Washington. The minister of state at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Sir Alan Duncan (another close personal friend, I should declare), made a characteristically forthright statement in defence of me while also insisting on the importance of diplomats worldwide being able to report freely and frankly. The Hansard report of the subsequent debate, which I read a few hours after it took place, provided a reassuring picture of near complete support.

But what remained in my mind, of course, were the handful of dissenting views. There had been a furious intervention in the debate from Sir Bill Cash MP, who described my ‘toxic attacks on the US President’ as ‘completely unjustified’, adding that as chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee he was ‘more than well aware of my prejudices’. (To give his remarks some context, I had appeared before his committee several times in my EU days, tasked with explaining and defending government EU policy: he has no more knowledge of my personal views or ‘prejudices’ on anything than he has of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe.) And for good measure, Dominic Raab MP, a former cabinet minister and one of the unsuccessful candidates for the Conservative leadership, said on Newsnight that I was wrong to have included ‘personalised remarks’ in my confidential reporting; while also perplexingly arguing that, by contrast, for Boris Johnson to say publicly, while mayor of London, that Donald Trump was ‘stupefyingly ignorant’ was completely fine.

The team also kept me updated on the war on social media: I was apparently well ahead on body count. One comment in particular caught my eye. Mia Farrow, icon of 1970s cinema and star of Rosemary’s Baby, tweeted: ‘The Ambassador is only saying what everybody knows. Trump continues to disgrace America, at home and abroad.’ Actually, I didn’t say anything remotely so forthright: but she was trying to help, and anyway, it would have been unwise to take issue with Satan’s mother.

I was scheduled to have lunch that day with one of the senior Arab ambassadors. She was a longstanding friend and exceptionally well connected: knew everyone, was invited to everything. My plan had been to use the meeting to catch up on the latest on senior adviser Jared Kushner’s long-awaited proposals for an Israel–Palestine peace settlement, and to find out when her country’s leader would next be in Washington. In the event, we mostly talked about the leaks. She commiserated, and said that every ambassador was saying the same as me. But there was an air of finality about the discussion; I sensed that she didn’t expect to see me again.

Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade, arrived in Washington that afternoon on a long-scheduled visit. I was due to accompany him on most of his calls the following day, including those to his counterpart, commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, to Ivanka Trump in the White House, and to a couple of Republican senators. I was also due to attend a dinner at the US Treasury that evening in honour of the ruler of Qatar: though the host was Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, there were rumours that the President would attend. I quickly calculated that my participation (or not) in these events would demonstrate the scope and severity of the President’s injunction against me.

I talked briefly to Liam Fox, who was as friendly, measured and supportive as I could have hoped. And then I stepped back onto the diplomatic treadmill, hosting a reception at the residence for the departing head of corporate affairs at the embassy. As I delivered some valedictory remarks – mostly, in the British tradition, jokes and unflattering stories about him from his colleagues – I was conscious of a slightly edgy atmosphere, and became aware that the guests from the administration were looking warily at me. Is he going to say something about the leaks? Is he going to get emotional? They should have known better: Brits don’t emote, least of all in public. Afterwards, some of the embassy staff came with me to a well-known Mexican restaurant in Washington, Lauriol Plaza; nothing like a couple of margaritas to make the world look a better place.

Tuesday started ominously. I was told that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin wanted to speak on the telephone. I had breakfast with Liam Fox and his team, and went into the embassy, in part to show them that I was still alive. I then heard that Wilbur Ross was no longer available to meet Liam – though strangely, he could take a telephone call from him at any stage during the day. The lie of the land could not have been clearer if someone had taped a ‘get lost’ message to a brick and thrown it through a window of the residence.

I phoned Mnuchin mid-morning. Sounding understandably uncomfortable, he said that it would be inappropriate for me to attend the Qatari dinner, given recent events. I said I was sorry to miss it, but I understood. I decided on the spot also to pull out of the meeting with Ivanka Trump; I could see myself being blocked at the White House security gates. Meanwhile, my congressional team were checking whether I would be welcome at Liam Fox’s two meetings that afternoon with prominent Republicans, the North Carolina congressman George Holding and the long-serving senator from Iowa, Chuck Grassley. Quick answers came back from both: ‘Of course!’

I took a couple of phone calls from colleagues in London: Mark Sedwill, cabinet secretary, and Simon McDonald, Foreign Office permanent secretary. Both insisted there was strong support in London, including in Parliament. Simon would ask how reporting on Brexit by the US Embassy would look if published. (I subsequently discovered from friends inside the US system that the US Embassy in London’s reporting on the performance of the May government and its handling of the EU departure process made my comments on the Trump administration look like a prolonged round of applause.)

The meetings that afternoon in Congress went fine; indeed, better than fine. Congressman Holding joked that he was glad to see that I was still alive. Senator Grassley said pointedly: ‘Ambassador, you are always welcome here.’ Otherwise, both members of Congress knew Liam Fox well, and promised strong support for a future US–UK free trade deal.

On my return to the embassy, I took a phone call from Vernon Jordan. I had met Vernon within a few weeks of my arrival. He is near legendary in the US. A highly successful lawyer and a leading figure in the African-American community, he had in his early career been a prominent civil rights activist. When he first came to lunch with me, he told me the story of his game-breaking 1961 court victory, when he forced the University of Georgia to accept its first African-American students, and then personally escorted them onto the campus through a large crowd of angry protesters. Vernon told me how sorry he was about what was happening and that I was guilty only of telling the truth. From this heroic figure, that meant a lot.

The afterglow of Vernon’s words survived through the next meeting: a drink with the visiting House of Commons arms export controls committee. They, understandably, wanted the inside story on the leaks and the US reaction, rather than an exposition on US arms control policy. They were warm, sympathetic and supportive. But the glow faded somewhat when I went back into the embassy, where I was ambushed by my political team. It was 10 p.m. in the UK; and the political event of the moment had been a televised debate between the two remaining candidates for the succession to Theresa May, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt and his predecessor in the role, Boris Johnson. The team told me that Hunt had volunteered strong support for me – ‘if I become Prime Minister, Darroch stays’ – and had challenged his opponent to make the same commitment. Johnson had failed to do so. Instead, he had ducked and weaved and argued that this was not something that should be debated in public. And Johnson’s apparent failure ‘to back the British ambassador in Washington’ had become the lead story out of the debate.

Someone thrust a mobile phone with the relevant clip from the debate between Hunt and Johnson into my hand. I watched but barely registered what I was seeing, distracted by the arrival of one of the media team brandishing a printout of the front pages of the UK newspapers. I was the lead story in at least two, The Times and the Guardian, though the latter headlined the President’s attack on the PM rather than his comments about me. But the Times headline was chilling: ‘I won’t deal with British Ambassador, says Trump’. The sub-headline twisted the knife: ‘President puts pressure on embattled envoy’. Even as I despaired at the words, however, I had to laugh at what lay immediately alongside them. The Times had chosen to place immediately next to their Trump story a large photograph of Snowball, a cockatoo with the most extraordinary golden plumage on its head. Snowball’s presence on the front page was apparently the product of his talent for previously unseen cockatoo dance moves – rather than, say, any passing resemblance to the most famous coiffure on the planet. The British sense of humour really is matchless.

I then went back to the flat in the residence. A call came through from a longstanding contact who happened to be the political editor of a leading UK paper. I had been avoiding calls from journalists all day; this one I took. After asking how I was, he invited me to comment on the debate between Hunt and Johnson. I declined. He then paused before saying, ‘I’m wondering whether you are going to fall on your sword.’ I said instantly, ‘Why should I?’ But he had articulated exactly the question that was starting to bounce around in my head.

On the spur of the moment, I decided I needed to canvass views. I invited the team over for a casual supper, rustled up at zero notice by the brilliant residence staff. The mood was outwardly cheerful but brittle. I sensed it could be snapped with a single sentence. This was a collection of the best and the brightest from the most distinguished diplomatic service in the world, but they hadn’t experienced anything quite like this before. By contrast, I had: though never with myself at the centre.

I said to them: ‘Given what the President has said, do you think I can now actually do the job of ambassador? Just theoretically, would British interests be better served if I wasn’t around?’ As I’d expected, this somewhat dampened the hitherto upbeat mood. Some of them made the argument that it would all calm down, especially if the incoming Prime Minister made it his business to smooth things over. I proffered the counter-argument that this was a President who held grudges; and that everyone in the administration to whom I spoke from then on would be holding the best stuff back. So while I could stagger on, I wouldn’t be delivering the insights which they, and the wider government, had a right to expect from me.

We kicked the arguments around for a while without resolution, though inside, my own views were hardening. But I knew there was someone more important I had to consult before reaching a decision, even though, with the five-hour time difference, it was approaching 3 a.m. in the UK. I excused myself and went to phone Vanessa.

2
Off and Then On Again

*

‘I think the PM has other plans for Washington’

– Jeremy Heywood, cabinet secretary

*

IT WAS July 2015. I was coming to the end of my four years as national security adviser. David Cameron had just won a surprise election victory. Change was in the Whitehall air. One of my outer office team telephoned me. ‘Jeremy’s office just rang. Can you pop down?’ I guessed immediately that the summons from Jeremy Heywood, as cabinet secretary the most senior civil servant in the country, could be about a move; or possibly just an exit. There was no guarantee of another job after the national security post.

I was at Jeremy’s door in thirty seconds. As I had anticipated, he got straight to the point: ‘Have you thought about what you want to do next?’ I had of course thought long and hard about precisely that question, and had reached a simple conclusion. It was arguably my time to move to the private sector; but there was one job which would keep me in the public service. ‘I’d like to go to Washington,’ I said. ‘And the timing fits: Peter Westmacott will have done his four years at the end of this year.’ Jeremy looked as if he had expected this, and came straight back with: ‘I think the Prime Minister has other plans for Washington.’

I, in turn, wasn’t surprised. If another civil servant had been ahead of me for the post, I would, after my time as national security adviser, have been disappointed. But I guessed there might be a political figure in the wings: Washington was a job which had often gone to political appointees. Indeed, as a junior press spokesman in the Foreign Office back in the 1970s, I’d had to defend then Prime Minister Jim Callaghan’s appointment of his son-in-law, Peter Jay, to Washington. I could still remember the witty newspaper headline: ‘The son-in-law also rises’.

Jeremy asked whether I would be interested in other roles. I said that I felt I had done enough time in Whitehall; and the job I had just completed had represented the summit of my ambitions, were Washington not an option. Jeremy asked what I would do. I said I would try my luck outside government. We left it at that.

As I retreated to my office, I was grateful to Jeremy for his frankness. He was one of the finest civil servants I had known; and he had been a friend, an ally and an invaluable source of advice throughout my time as national security adviser. His death of cancer in 2018, tragically young, remains a huge loss to the country. As for the possibility of a political appointee to Washington, I was philosophical. The Prime Minister had a perfect right to do so, given the pre-eminent importance of the relationship between the UK and the US. Anyway, the private sector would be interesting; if rumour was correct, less work for (much) more money.

I broke the news to Vanessa that evening. She was similarly philosophical, knowing that, in a diplomatic career, nothing was for sure until you got on the plane. She had learnt this early, through the protracted saga of my first posting, back in 1980. In practice, in those days, you went where you were sent. But in theory, you could express preferences. So we spent an evening choosing our top three preferences from the list of jobs available, and the three we wanted to avoid. It was with some trepidation, then, that I went home one evening and told her: ‘I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is: I’ve got a posting. The bad news is that it’s Lagos, one of our bottom three!’

But that was just the start. One of the periodic Foreign Office economy drives led to the Lagos job being cut. So the FO’s Plan B was that I should go to The Hague. I even took a couple of Dutch lessons, from which I remember the phrase Der tafellaken is helder wit: ‘the tablecloth is bright white’. It didn’t seem to me the most useful observation, but perhaps I hadn’t attended enough diplomatic dinners. In any case, my efforts at Dutch were wasted when the FO decided to keep the incumbent on in post for another year. So I waited another few weeks, to be told I was going to Tokyo at a month’s notice. As it turned out, Tokyo was a fabulous posting, where we made friendships that have lasted to this day. And from that episode on, we knew that the unexpected was to be expected. We grew to treasure the unpredictability of diplomatic life.

Two days passed. For the first time in my life, I started to read about my pension arrangements – but found the details utterly baffling. And then, out of nowhere, a second summons to Jeremy’s office arrived.

Jeremy came straight to the point. He told me that the Prime Minister thought I had done a good job as national security adviser, and was inclined to find a way to meet my Washington ambitions. But it would only be for two, perhaps two and a half years, rather than the usual three to four. How would I feel about that?

I said immediately that I would be fine with it. A small part of me was thinking that by mid-2018 I would have done four decades in the diplomatic service and might want a change of scene. But a bigger part of me was calculating that if a week was a long time in politics, two years was an eternity: a lot could happen in that time.

A few days later, I picked up a plausible rumour about what the plan might have been. The story was that David Cameron was not going to fight the 2020 election. He was instead intending to stand down in the second half of 2018, to leave his successor a clear run in office, eighteen months before the election. And Ed Llewellyn, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, would be sent to Washington when David resigned. Ed was a good friend whom I had known for close to twenty years, an accomplished and well-liked linchpin in No. 10, and a natural diplomat. So I wouldn’t have begrudged him the job for a second. In the end, however, the great roulette wheel of life took another spin, as I had guessed it might: within a year of my conversation with Jeremy, Cameron would resign and Ed would go to Paris rather than Washington. There are worse second prizes.

Washington is, in the eyes of most in the British diplomatic service, the most coveted post on the planet. So over the inevitable long celebratory dinner at our local, The Glasshouse in Kew, Vanessa and I talked about the circuitous route which was taking us to 3100 Massachusetts Avenue; and about quite how big a part luck had played in the journey. Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow – in the days when she did more films, less lifestyle – is a minor but entertaining British romcom from 1998, built around the intriguing idea of two parallel stories. In one, our Gwyneth is running for a train on the London Underground, gets distracted by a lost earring, and just misses it: the doors slide shut with her stranded on the platform. In the other, she makes it onto the train. The two stories then play out. In one scenario, life works out well; in the other, badly. It thus illustrates an eternal truth: that in everyone’s life, there are chance moments, or seemingly small decisions, which can in practice change your life irrevocably.

So what journey brought me to this point? The Darrochs are a Scottish clan, concentrated mostly on the island of Jura, off Scotland’s west coast: beautiful if you like bleak and windswept, famous for Jura whisky, the Corryvreckan whirlpool, just off the island’s northern tip, and the fact that George Orwell wrote 1984 in a farmhouse on the island whilst dying from tuberculosis (in a letter to his agent, he complained of ‘a quite unendurable winter’). But Scottish ancestry notwithstanding, I was born in South Stanley, County Durham, where my grandparents on my mother’s side lived – my grandfather was a miner. My brother, Neil, followed some twenty-two months later. I lived until the age of six in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father taught at the local expatriate school. My parents then split up and my brother and I returned to England with my father: apart from a brief visit she paid to the UK a few months later, I never saw my mother again. And as a typically inhibited, or perhaps repressed, Englishman I have never tried to track her down. I’m told she left my father after meeting someone else in Kenya – this was, after all, the Happy Valley era. Hence she stayed there and my father returned to England with my brother and me. I’m also told that somewhere, I have two half-sisters. But life has moved on.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, as might have been more usual, my brother and I had stayed with her rather than accompanying my father – the first of those life-determining sliding doors moments. I suppose I might still have gone to university. But I can’t believe I would thence have joined the Foreign Office. And to focus on the important stuff, if nothing else I would have been known as Nigel rather than Kim; the former was my mother’s choice, the latter my father’s – a lifelong Rudyard Kipling fan. And I would thereby have escaped four years in Tokyo where, until they met me, most Japanese assumed I was Korean, as in Kim Dae Ryung; and three years in Washington where, until they met me, most Americans assumed I was a woman.

On arrival back in England, my father initially got a teaching job at a school in Midhurst, Sussex, leaving my brother and me with my grandmother, who was headteacher at the village primary school in the hamlet of Farnborough in Berkshire: he would drive up to see us at weekends. Farnborough’s only claim to fame is that it is, at 720 feet above sea level, the highest village in … well, Berkshire. Perhaps that’s why the headteacher’s cottage was so cold.

It was a gentle but isolated existence, in a community dominated by farming. There was a village squire, living in what looked to me like a stately home at the top end of the village. But it was also clear, even to a child of my age, that there was a good deal of rural poverty around. And the village school was genuinely tiny; around forty pupils, of all ages from five to eleven. There were some primitive touches, such as outside lavatories, and school meals delivered daily by van, in metal containers the size and shape of milk churns. The meals were, I suspect, already overcooked by several hours before being deposited in the containers, and the subsequent van journey encouraged the process of deterioration to continue. There are things which to this day I cannot eat, among them custard and gravy, so traumatic did I find some of the contents of those churns.

There was another side to this modest village school. My grandmother was formidable: a force of nature. She had been an army teacher during the Second World War, and had been evacuated out of several locations in North Africa. The British Army had actually missed a trick; had they promoted her to field marshal, the enemy would have fled. As it was, she imposed strict discipline and an iron rule on the school, I daresay on the whole village. My brother and I always felt that she was harder on us than anyone else; no doubt she was anxious to head off accusations of favouritism.

But whatever, it worked. I did well enough academically to be entered for the scholarship exams for Abingdon School, about thirty miles away. There was a Darroch history with the school; two of my uncles had gone there, though not my father. Abingdon was at that stage a direct grant establishment (it’s now fully independent), which meant that while most pupils there were fee-paying, the local authority funded a small number of scholarship kids – of whom I turned out to be one, when I lucked through the exams. I was one of the last of the direct grant generation; the Labour government abolished the scheme in 1975, thus denying bright children from less well off backgrounds the chance to go to great schools. No doubt those responsible for the decision could justify it; but to me, to this day, it looks like an act of tribal political vandalism.

Abingdon was a mixed experience. It was a wonderful school, which has since become famous as the alma mater of Radiohead (coincidentally, I’m sure, a new music school was built in the school grounds while I was there). But I was a difficult and disruptive teenager, setting school records for the number of detentions and beatings in a single term and constantly on the edge of expulsion. A psychologist would no doubt attribute this to a broken home and an absent mother. But for me, it was much more about an instinctive and, it turned out, lifelong resistance to authority; to this day, if I am ever ‘ordered’ to do anything, as opposed to being politely asked, my inclination is to do the opposite.

I was also painfully conscious at school of being different from everyone else – in terms of where I’d come from and where I lived. When I won a scholarship, my grandmother retired from the village school, and we moved at short notice to Abingdon – with my father at that stage still visiting at weekends. As was straightforward in those days, we were assigned a first-floor flat in a council estate about fifteen minutes’ walk from the school; the British equivalent of US public housing. Abingdon School had a distinctive school uniform, and as I walked out of the estate every morning, instantly identifiable as the only Abingdonian on the estate, I imagined every curtain twitching and ambushes being hatched. The reality, though, was quite different. There were no attacks, and my brother and I ended up playing impromptu games of football with the local youths most evenings. And when my father got a job in the area, remarried and bought a house, I missed the estate.

I just about survived at Abingdon. I was one of only a handful to be given no responsibility whatever: I was made neither a school nor a house prefect. I played tennis for the school, and some rugby (though I never reached the glamour of the first XV, for which I would have traded a lot, especially since my younger brother, though at a different school, was a star rugby player). But I got some good O levels; and then, despite picking the wrong subjects for A level – Biology, Chemistry and Physics when I should have done English and History – got good enough grades to head north, to Durham University, to study Zoology. I never even considered Oxbridge.

Durham was in some ways a re-run of Abingdon. The university had a collegiate system, and I had chosen, pretty much at random, Hatfield College. I discovered when I arrived that Hatfield, while modest in its academic record, was comfortably the strongest college at sport; one of its students, Pete Warfield, actually played rugby for England while at the college. I wholeheartedly embraced the spirit of the establishment, barely attending a lecture in my first year, with the result that I failed all my first-year exams, and was threatened with expulsion unless I resat and passed them all in August. To the visible surprise of my tutors, I managed to replace three fails with three passes. In the second year, I failed to complete my dissertation (on the concentration of certain ions in the body fluids of Chilopoda and Diplopoda) by the deadline of the end of the summer term (the truth was, I had failed even to start it); so I lost another summer to catching up and scraping through. On the other side of the ledger, I played rugby for the college and fives and squash for the university. And most important, I met Vanessa, who became my girlfriend. One of my opening gambits was to take her on a hunting expedition for specimens for my dissertation – centipedes and millipedes. With romantic dates like that, no wonder she later agreed to marry me.

My university career ended, predictably enough, with a lower second class honours degree in Zoology. Strong-armed by Vanessa into doing some work, I actually came quite close to getting an upper second; but the faculty debated long and hard and decided, I was told on a split vote, that my failure to deliver a dissertation on time should disqualify me. I had, meanwhile, been offered a place to do a masters at Imperial College in Applied Entomology. But with only a lower second, there was no government grant forthcoming. So I had to go and find a job.

I stayed up in the North-East for that post-university summer. I got a summer job a few miles away from Durham in Spennymoor, at a factory making fluorescent strip lights. My role was in the paint plant. The job was simple enough. The metal carcasses for the lights were placed on hooks on a raised conveyor belt. They disappeared into the paint machine, then reappeared a while later, gleaming white and hot to the touch, the paint having been blow-dried en route. My job was to unhook them from the conveyor belt and stack them neatly on a pallet. They would then be picked up by a forklift truck and transported to their place of union with the lighting tubes. There was a problem, however; try as I did, I couldn’t lift the carcasses off their hooks quickly enough – with the result that some of them were making a second circuit through the paint plant, acquiring an unwanted second coat. This initially caused hilarity amongst the permanent workforce – ‘you’ve been to university but you can’t do this’ – then eventually exasperation. But in those far-off kinder days, I wasn’t fired as I deserved: instead I got a welcome transfer to driving the forklift trucks, notwithstanding my never having done this before. Health and safety wasn’t such a downer in those days.

Meanwhile, in the heat of that 1975 summer – at the time, it was the hottest August on record – I also started to look for a more permanent job. My co-workers at the factory were worried about me. They could see that I wasn’t up to manual labour. And they were bemused when I told them of my degree in Zoology. As one of them put it to me: ‘How many zoos are there in the country? And there’s already that Johnny Morris on the TV.’ Encouraged by this show of confidence, I fixed an appointment with the university careers advisory office. My interviewer asked me what I wanted to do. I confessed that I had no idea, but mentioned the Foreign Office. Vanessa’s father had suggested this to her previous boyfriend who was studying Classics at Oxford. The ex had dismissed the idea, but she found a readier audience in me. Diplomacy, after all, sounded just the ticket for someone who had read Ian Fleming’s entire literary output by the time I was fifteen.

The careers adviser, however, was less persuadable. She looked quizzically at me, observed that leaping from zoology to diplomacy was a bit of a stretch, and added that it was in any case almost impossible to get through the entrance exams. She suggested instead that I think about a career in business, and try applying to some of the big British multinationals with graduate schemes. I took away a sheaf of application forms; but also a growing determination to try for the Foreign Office, primarily to spite another authority figure.

There were two entry levels to the Foreign Office: the ‘fast stream’ and the ‘executive’. Knowing no better, I applied for both – as well as throwing in a handful of applications for companies, chosen on a more or less random basis. The FO process kicked off well before anything else stirred in the employment jungle. Within a few weeks, I found myself in a large hall somewhere in Oxford, working through a day of exams – a strange mix of IQ-style tests and an essay about how you would respond to some sort of existential national crisis, a plague, invasion by zombies, that sort of thing. Mysteriously, I passed – and got invited to two days of further tests and exercises. These were intriguing, including an interview with a psychologist, more essays, more IQ tests, a general knowledge exam, and a session where groups were created and everyone took turns in chairing a meeting.

Having somehow survived this – especially the interview with the psychologist – I was invited to the third stage, the final selection board. And here I came seriously unstuck. Having drifted into the interview with no thought or preparation, I was stumped on basic questions like, why did I want to join the Foreign Office? Saying that I enjoyed travel didn’t hack it. The rejection letter popped through the letterbox a few days later.

I had in parallel been pursuing the process for Foreign Office entry at executive level – or ‘the slow stream’ as I subsequently discovered it was dismissively called within the system. It was much simpler: a half day of exams and then a final interview. And some of the companies to which I had applied had offered me interviews. About a week before the first of these, with ICI, then the largest industrial conglomerate in the UK, the Foreign Office accepted me. Vanessa and I pondered for at least a couple of hours that evening how I should respond – and we agreed I should give it a go. There was nothing to lose: if I didn’t like it, in those golden days there were many more career options available for even the most average of university graduates. And after all, the Foreign Office had been the first to offer me a job.

I moved to London and joined the Foreign Office in September 1976. I found a basement flat on Mount Ephraim Road, a few hundred yards from Streatham Hill Station. It was basically a bedroom about the size of a large bed, with a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen. But its overriding feature was damp – mould on the walls and the carpets, cracks and holes in the plasterwork, peeling paper on the ceiling. I thought it was great and still feel nostalgic about it. As for life in government, Labour were in power. Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and Anthony Crosland was Foreign Secretary (though he died in office with a cerebral haemorrhage). I rapidly discovered what being in the ‘slow stream’ meant. My entry group were given a single day’s induction, which concentrated on where the lavatories were and how a file of papers should be put together. We heard that the fast streamers had a welcome to the service lasting a week, during which they were told many times how wonderful they were to have triumphed against such intense competition. Their week reportedly concluded with a glass of sherry with the permanent under secretary. All of us, whether fast or slow, were then dispatched to departments to learn our trade. But there was a hierarchy here too. The fast streamers were sent to the elite political departments, with names like Near East and North Africa Department and Latin America Department: NENAD and LAD for short. I was sent to Protocol Department – Protocol Department for short – to labour on the diplomatic privileges and immunities of the foreign diplomatic community in London, mostly cheap cars, cheap booze and unpaid parking tickets.

I found this more incentivising than discouraging. Even in the unglamorous surroundings of Protocol Department, I was enjoying the proximity to power, and the buzz from working next door to Downing Street – not to mention the events to which I got invited because, although protocol didn’t involve high policy, it did involve lots of parties. I remember being given a lift to one of them by one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As we approached the gates of some appropriately grand building, she said to me: ‘Young man, could you please get my tiara out of the glove compartment?’

Nevertheless, fifteen months later, as soon as I was allowed, I retook the fast stream exams. This time I passed. Possibly, after a year in the institution, I could better answer the question ‘Why do you want a career in the diplomatic service?’ Vanessa and I celebrated with the luxury of the day: a bottle of supermarket cider. And my course was set.

And thereafter I was, in essence, extraordinarily lucky. There were many ‘sliding doors’ moments when my career could have taken a different course. I remember three in particular. The first came towards the end of my first posting in Tokyo. There didn’t seem to be any interesting jobs coming up back in London – until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly decided she wanted to build the Channel Tunnel. I became the UK secretary of the Anglo-French Channel Fixed Link Treaty Working Group (‘Channel Fixed Link’ because it was thought at the time that it might be a bridge rather than a tunnel). And that led to my organising the ceremony to mark the signing of the Channel Tunnel treaty. I chose, and sold to No. 10, Canterbury Cathedral Chapter House for the ceremony; and the dean of the cathedral’s house for Thatcher’s lunch with François Mitterrand. When, some ten years later, my son arrived for his first day at King’s Canterbury, the wonderful school in the grounds of the cathedral to which both my children went, I was able to show him the plaque commemorating the event. I’m not sure he was impressed! But No. 10 were happy; and it launched me, in terms of making the senior levels of the Foreign Office aware of my existence.

The second moment came in the mid-1990s, when I was deputy head of European Union Department. It was time for me to bid for an overseas posting. I was vaguely attracted to the job of deputy ambassador in Prague; a beautiful city, an interesting country, and fascinating politics, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So I bid. A few weeks later, my boss, the head of the European Directorate, called me in and said he was about to go to the postings board. Did I really want to go to Prague? For some reason – perhaps the cold grey drizzle that day, which struck me as all too central European – I said, ‘Not really. I’ve changed my mind.’ He told me a few hours later that I would have got it, had he not intervened to kill it.

Had I not, on the spur of the moment, said no, I would have missed out on one of the most exciting jobs of my career. Six months later, by which time I would have been in Prague, I was asked at short notice to become head of Eastern Adriatic Department, which was then dealing with the war in Bosnia. It was the biggest foreign policy issue of the moment, and it catapulted me to a different level in terms of profile in the FO, No. 10 and Whitehall. It also sent me, within a few weeks, on a military plane into Sarajevo, a city terrorised by Bosnian Serb snipers who manned the surrounding hillsides, shooting at any residents within range. Perhaps out of boredom, they also shot at our plane as it came in to land, prompting the cancellation of our flight out that evening. I thus spent the night in besieged, war-torn Sarajevo, which at the time was suffering from frequent electricity and water cuts. It also led to one of the more memorable meals of my career, in one of the few functioning restaurants – ‘Sarajevo schnitzel’, an unidentified piece of meat deep-fried in breadcrumbs. Judging by its corrugated appearance, whatever it was had been run over by a tank.

And the third sliding doors moment came in 2004, when I was director general for Europe. Stephen Wall was the Prime Minister’s Europe adviser – the most important European policy job anywhere in the system. This is Stephen’s story rather than mine, but because of policy differences with Tony Blair, especially in relation to the euro, he unexpectedly and suddenly resigned. A few months previously, I had run for, but failed to get, the post of political director in the Foreign Office. Suddenly, I was the only credible candidate on the scene for Europe adviser to the Prime Minister – a job that was actually a grade higher than political director, elevating me to the ranks of permanent secretaries. I spent three years in No. 10 advising Tony Blair on Europe policy – which led directly to my appointment as ambassador to the European Union in 2007. This in turn led to my becoming national security adviser to David Cameron in 2012; which in turn led to Washington. I owe a lot to Stephen Wall … or as Bob Dylan put it: ‘Blame it on that simple twist of fate’.

3
Discovering ‘Real America’

*

‘I like Donald Trump; he says what I’m thinking’

– an Uber driver in Jackson, Mississippi, November 2015

*

‘DONALD TRUMP is making quite an impact, and leading in the opinion polls. But he won’t win the nomination.’

It was late 2015. The words were spoken by one of America’s leading political pundits, to general agreement around the table. Thanks to the hospitality of the then British ambassador, Peter Westmacott, and his wife Susie, Vanessa and I were staying at the British residence in Washington DC for a couple of days before embarking on an American road trip; a personal journey around ‘real America’ before I took up my posting in late January 2016. And I was attending one of the regular ‘pundits’ breakfasts’ which generations of British ambassadors in Washington have hosted.

A US road trip, exploring the freedom and romance of the endless highway, had been a longstanding ambition of mine, ever since being hooked by the classic American ‘road movies’ of the late 1960s and early 70s: Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, Two Lane Blacktop, and my all-time favourite film, Five Easy Pieces. And with three months’ ‘preparation’ for my posting to Washington, it seemed like the perfect time. Like most Britons of my generation, I had visited New York and Boston, and San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast. But the rest of the country was uncharted, imagined through watching too many American films. It being November, we had to go south to avoid the cold, snow and ice. So we planned a drive from Nashville, where our son Simon was teaching at Vanderbilt University, down to New Orleans through the heart of the Deep South. We were then going to fly to Las Vegas for a two-day introduction to that symbol of American excess; after that we would drive across to Utah to see something of the American south-west, and in particular to experience the wonders of Zion and Bryce National Parks. As for where we finished, our oldest friends, Nigel and Lou Graham, whom we had known since our university days, had volunteered to join us for the trip: they offered their apartment in Long Boat Key, a short drive and long bridge across from Sarasota in Florida, as the perfect oasis for the final week.

It wasn’t just about reliving the Seventies. I would be arriving in Washington at the start of election year. Who is running America matters to everyone. Every government has a reason to want to influence the White House on one issue or another. And the central figures in a future White House tend to be drawn from the leading figures in the campaign team. So tracking the election, and building relationships with the top advisers, would be an overriding priority. And I wanted to get a head start by understanding how the candidates were seen in other parts of America.

But before flying down to Nashville, there were two more events in Washington. We attended a dinner in the residence at which the guest of honour was Frank Luntz. This was the first of many encounters with Frank, who became a good friend. He is a big, colourful personality; to see Frank interrogate a focus group is to see an artist at work. He describes himself as a political and communications consultant, pollster and pundit. He is a lifelong, but mainstream, Republican: a familiar face on US TV politics shows. Most of all, he is a great Anglophile from his days at Trinity College, Oxford, where he advised our current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, on his bid for the presidency of the Oxford Union. Successive British ambassadors have benefited from his knowledge and judgement and his generous nature. Frank duly presented to the assembly his latest polling figures, and concluded that, while the Republican race was still open, Hillary Clinton was likely to win the Democratic nomination and eventually the White House. To be fair to Frank, every pollster was saying the same. And every pundit was transfixed by the Democrats’ Blue Wall: the theory that the Democrats were ‘guaranteed’ 240 electoral college votes from states which were ‘certain’ to vote Democrat, and only needed another 30 or so to reach the 272 required to win the presidency.

We concluded with a day exploring Washington. On the way to look at the White House, we drove past the Watergate building. As someone who, while a university student, had followed every twist of the Watergate saga, it felt like touching history. But the highlight was a trip to the top of the Washington Monument – all 555 feet of it. We were accompanied and guided by an engagingly enthusiastic park ranger. I confess that we took the lift up, saving the spiral staircase for the downward journey. But so knowledgeable was our guide that we probably climbed half of it anyway, so frequently on the descent did we double back to see things we had missed. His potted history of the monument included the information that its construction had been halted for more than a decade in the mid-1800s, because its backers had run out of money; a reminder that, in America, the land of private enterprise, it is for the most part wealthy philanthropists that build the monuments, not the state. The ranger pointed to the visible manifestation of this temporary bankruptcy: halfway up, the stone changes colour slightly because when construction restarted, the stone from the original quarry had been exhausted. Once you know this, it leaps out at you to a degree which the monument’s original backers must have found vexing. But the view from the top remains timeless. Dusk was falling as we gazed out across Washington; as the lights came on across the city, we looked down the Mall, glimpsed the White House, and thrilled at the adventure to come.

Nashville was utterly different. We stayed with our son, Simon, who, having done his doctorate at Yale, had been made assistant professor of geology at Vanderbilt University, right in the heart of the city. Knowing Nashville only by reputation, I imagined a bar on every corner, each with a resident country and western singer. This wasn’t actually far from the truth, except it wasn’t only country and western. Nigel and Lou joined up with us at this point; and on that first night, Simon took us to the epitome of a dive: an old-fashioned Nashville music venue called The Basement, a sweaty, shabby and stained cellar with a tiny ramshackle bar in one corner, selling beer and some of the worst wines on the planet. There was no stage, with the performers standing a few feet from the audience. A succession of bands performed, some with recording contracts, some just hopeful wannabes; but all were exceptional musicians. The show opened with brief singer-songwriter acoustic sets, but swiftly moved on to loud, hard rock music and blues. We loved it.

It being after midnight, we took an Uber back to Simon’s apartment. The driver was female – married, young children, earning some extra money. I asked her how she saw US politics. She said she ‘kinda liked Donald Trump’; she remembered him from The Apprentice and thought he must be a smart businessman. I expressed surprise: wasn’t she hoping to see the first woman President? She said emphatically: ‘I’m not with Hillary Clinton. I just don’t trust her.’ I asked why. The response carried an edge of genuine dislike. ‘She just says what she thinks you want to hear. She doesn’t really care about people like me.’

Back in the apartment, I reflected on what I’d heard, and how perceptions confounded reality. Hillary Clinton had been raised in a classically middle-class family, her father the owner of a small drapery business and lifelong Republican, her mother a Democrat. And her presidential campaign was about ‘inclusive capitalism’: keeping jobs in America, sharing profits with the workers, equal pay for women, more affordable healthcare. Donald Trump was the billionaire son of a New York property developer, who had been loaned $400 million by his father to start his business career, had his own jet, and ran expensive hotels, casinos and golf clubs. Yet Trump was seen as the authentic one, who cared about America’s blue-collar classes, and Clinton as the fake. There was clearly something very wrong about how Clinton was marketing herself or very right about how Trump was selling himself.

Back on the music trail, we also went to a much larger, but similarly raw, Nashville venue called Cannery Ballroom, there to see a nationally renowned Southern rock band, with a multiple-album recording history, called The Drive-By Truckers. I had grown up with the rock music of the American South – The Allman Brothers Band, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd – so I knew what to expect; and they were terrific. Their best tracks remain on my playlist to this day. Add to these musical experiences some great restaurants and a wonderfully cool cocktail bar called The Patterson House, and we could have stayed in Nashville for weeks.

But we didn’t. Instead, we set off for New Orleans. There were limits to our embrace of the 1960s counterculture; we hired a large SUV rather than a couple of Harley-Davidsons. We loaded up with emergency rations of that wonderful American invention, trail mix, from Trader Joe’s and hit the road.

It is a little over 500 miles from Nashville to New Orleans; a day’s drive for an American, three for those of us lacking the frontier gene. On a map, it is due south, then about an inch to the left, so there were several route options. We decided to drive down the length of Mississippi, mostly using the Natchez Trace Parkway, a famous road built in the 1930s; it follows the route of the Natchez Trace, a historic forest trail created and used by Native Americans from prehistoric times, then colonised by early European explorers and settlers. During the War of 1812, the US army used the Trace to supply General Jackson’s forces in New Orleans. This led directly, I suppose, to Jackson’s decisive and fabled victory against the invading British forces in the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815, his ascension to national hero status, and ultimately to his election as President in 1829. The ‘simple twist of fate’ here is that the battle should never have happened: the two governments had already signed a peace deal, the Treaty of Ghent, on 24 December 1814. But news travelled slowly in those days, with the British forces in the area not learning of the treaty until a month later. I could not but wonder whether Jackson would have made it to the White House if WhatsApp had been invented at the time.

Notwithstanding the Trace’s crucial role in the defeat of our countrymen two hundred years earlier – perhaps we had deserved it for burning down the White House and the Capitol in the same war – we joined it a few miles outside Nashville. It was extraordinarily beautiful; a two-lane blacktop through a fairytale, sun-dappled forest that stretched to the horizon. And with scarcely a building visible on the entire route, the view to each side was the one the early explorers would have seen – when the Trace was known as the Devil’s Backbone, because if the diseases didn’t get you, the highwaymen and bandits would. We rapidly discovered, however, one drawback to this journey through a woodland wilderness. In the days when the Trace was the main route southwards, there were trading posts along it where travellers could get provisions, eat and sleep. These were all long gone. Around lunchtime, we googled the nearest diner: I think it was called Maisie’s Family Cafe. But when we arrived at it, a couple of miles off the Parkway, it was a scene from a post-apocalypse movie; a wrecked shell of a building, broken windows and a kicked-down door. Even worse, it wasn’t even serving food: so, trail mix for lunch.

After another hundred miles of glorious greenery, we turned off the Trace and took the short detour to Jackson, the capital of, and largest city in, the state of Mississippi. And yes, it is named after the victor of New Orleans and scourge of the British: more humble pie. We stayed at the Old Capitol Inn, a pleasingly quirky independent establishment just across the road from the Mississippi State Capitol. And on their recommendation, we set off by Uber for ‘the best Mexican restaurant in Jackson’.

Still intrigued by what I had heard in Nashville, I asked this Uber driver whether he was following the early days of the election race. ‘I’m interested,’ he said. I asked him who he liked. He replied, in an echo of his female Nashville counterpart: ‘I like Donald Trump, he says what I’m thinking.’ I asked about the rest of the field. He shrugged dismissively. ‘They’ve all been bought up by big business; they’re working for them, not us. But Trump is different. He’s self-financing.’ ‘Could Trump actually win?’ I asked. ‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘a lot of people agree with what he’s saying.’

The Mexican restaurant was indeed good. Among its specialities was guacamole freshly made at the table. One of the waiters pitched up with some avocados and proceeded to perform his party trick. Hearing our accents, he said, ‘Are you Australian?’ We told him we were visiting from England. ‘Why on earth have you come to Jackson?’ he said, looking genuinely amazed. We explained that we were driving from Nashville to New Orleans. ‘Well, I’d get out of this place as soon as possible if I were you,’ was his parting comment.

The guacamole was excellent.

Actually, we didn’t get out of Jackson quickly. We stayed a day, seeing the sights of the city. The highlight was a guided tour of the Capitol building. The Mississippi legislature wasn’t sitting and there were few visitors, so we had the building, and the tour guide, almost to ourselves. Built in 1903, it was ancient by American standards and a formally designated ‘Historic Place’. Intriguingly, in a typically American back story, it had been financed by the proceeds of a successful law suit for unpaid taxes won by the state of Mississippi against the Illinois Central Railroad; and it was built on the site of the old state penitentiary, which presumably helped to focus the minds of successive generations of Mississippi politicians.

The guide took us into the debating chambers and invited us to sit in the Speaker’s chair. As we wandered the corridors, I found myself gazing at the group photographs of generations of Mississippi state senators; on a less than comprehensive survey, it looked as if the first African-American senator had appeared in the mid-1980s. I also noticed an unexpected feature in the top left-hand corner of the state flag, and I asked the tour guide why Mississippi was still showcasing the Confederate flag in that way. He looked hugely embarrassed and said: ‘I really can’t discuss that.’ Surprised at this, I asked how people like him felt about the Civil War. He paused, looked at me intently, and said: ‘You have to realise, the Civil War was mostly fought here in the South. It was our homes that were burnt down, our crops that were pillaged, our economy and our way of life that was destroyed. That’s how we feel.’

Outside, in the autumn sunshine, we walked through the gardens surrounding the Capitol – and found more echoes of the Civil War. Right in front of the building stood a large monument, created as late as 1917, to ‘The Women of the Confederacy – mothers, sisters, wives and daughters’. A little further from the building was a statue of a Confederate soldier. I found myself recalibrating. I had expected our trip through the Deep South to resonate with echoes of the civil rights clashes of the Sixties; to remind me of places like Selma and Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, and of grainy black-and-white TV footage of protests and burnings and beatings. Instead, there were reminders and relics everywhere of another, wider and more savage conflict that had taken place a century earlier, the wounds of which seemed as deep and as open as if it had happened yesterday.

That evening, we again went to a downtown restaurant, this time by regular taxi rather than Uber. The vehicle was a huge SUV, but we found it more cramped than expected for the four of us; the driver had reclined his seat back to a near horizontal position, primarily to provide adequate space for his large stomach, which was more a beer barrel than a six-pack. The pile of empty fast food cartons in the passenger footwell provided a clue as to the cause of his condition. As with his predecessor, I invited his views on the election process. ‘Not interested,’ came the reply.

When we set off the next morning, heading for New Orleans via Natchez, I put Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road on the car CD player. Williams was born in Louisiana and her music is soaked in the Deep South. The album is a raw, heartfelt travelogue of the land we were travelling through: of Jackson, Vicksburg and Baton Rouge, of dusty back roads, cotton fields and dilapidated shacks. My travelling companions were insufficiently appreciative of the brilliance of the music first time round, so I made them listen to it all over again.

And so to Natchez – for lunch and a wander around a city that, prior to the Civil War, had boasted more millionaires than any other city in America. It enjoys a spectacular setting on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. We started at the visitor centre, where the main attraction was a short film on its history. Founded by French colonists in 1716, it was fought over for several years by the French and the Natchez tribe of Native Americans, traded to Spain in the Treaty of Paris of 1763, and sold again a few years later to, yes, the British. We then ceded it to the US after the American Revolutionary War. The combination of the cotton boom and Mississippi River trade made it, for a few decades, exceptionally wealthy. The film painted a picture of an era of extraordinarily gracious living; of wealth and privilege, society balls and horse racing, and the most beautiful antebellum mansions in all America. But it explained little of Natchez’s decline and depopulation, beyond the damage done to the cotton industry by the boll weevil infestation that struck the Deep South in the late 1800s.

As we left the centre, we concluded that there must have been more to the Natchez story. It was a warm still afternoon, so we bought some food and sat on the heights of the bluff, in the open air, overlooking the river. The Mississippi stretched out before us, as wide as a lake, mud-brown and sluggish. The far side was so thickly wooded that scarcely any buildings were visible; we realised that we were gazing upon a landscape that hadn’t much changed over the last two hundred years. And we trawled the internet for a more complete history of Natchez.

As we had expected, there was a darker side to the story. Natchez had also prospered thanks to slavery. The cotton plantations had thrived on slave labour, while Natchez itself had hosted the Forks of the Road Market, one of the largest slave markets in the whole of the South. The city was lucky enough to survive the Civil War largely undamaged; indeed, in 1863, Ulysses S. Grant set up temporary headquarters in one of Natchez’s finer antebellum mansions. And Natchez continued to prosper for some decades after the war. But then the boll weevil landed, and destroyed the cotton crops, and the railroads replaced the steamboat traffic, bypassing the river cities and drawing away their commerce.

Throughout, Natchez remained a centre of Confederate defiance, troubled race relations, Ku Klux Klan activity, and opposition to civil rights progress. African-American activists were targeted and churches burned down. In the mid-Sixties, E. L. McDaniel, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klans of America, had his office on Natchez’s Main Street.

As we mused on this alternative history, a minibus drew up behind us, and a dozen men emerged and started hoeing a large municipal flowerbed. I watched them for several minutes before I realised what I was seeing. They were prisoners. Dressed in identical overalls, they were the modern equivalent of a chain gang, though without the leg irons. It was a moment straight from the movies; Sullivan’s Travels, or perhaps Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?. I didn’t, however, dare to take a photograph; who knew what crimes they had committed?

On that note, we hit the highway for the final leg to New Orleans; the last stretch of Mississippi, then into Louisiana and True Detective territory. We arrived early evening, checked into another quirky hotel, this time in the French Quarter, and headed out to dinner with the honorary consul for the United Kingdom, James (Jimmy) J. Coleman Jr, CBE. Jimmy was from an old New Orleans family. A Princeton graduate and Oxford University postgraduate, he was a successful and wealthy lawyer and property developer, a friend of the British royal family, a philanthropist – and, at forty-four years, the longest serving British honorary consul anywhere on the planet. He was also exceptional company. (Sadly, Jimmy died in March 2019 after a fall in his parents’ mansion, and New Orleans thereby lost one of its great characters.)

The first evening, Jimmy took us to Antoine’s Restaurant, a New Orleans institution since 1840, where we sampled the eclectic fusion that is French-Creole cuisine while soaking up Jimmy’s lifetime experience of his city. We quizzed him in particular for his take on the US elections. He said that he looked at them as a businessman. In his view, Obama had been ‘anti-business’, always imposing new, profit-sapping regulations. So he would be voting Republican, along with most of his businessmen friends. ‘Including if Trump is the Republican nominee?’ I asked. Jimmy shrugged: ‘I don’t like him and hope he isn’t, but yes, he’s a businessman too, and he will know what needs to be done.’ This was my first experience of the other component of the growing Trump coalition; over the coming months I was to hear the same from the American business community up and down the country.

I also asked Jimmy about his experience, as a New Orleans resident, of Hurricane Katrina. He said that his own property had been virtually untouched. The same went for his immediate uptown neighbourhood. He also reminded me that there had been a 24-hour gap between the storm striking and the levees failing. So when he had walked around the city in the storm’s immediate aftermath, there hadn’t been that much damage. Then the flood waters came. And some parts, like New Orleans East, had never really recovered.

Intrigued by his account, we visited a semi-permanent Katrina exhibition in central New Orleans the next morning. After absorbing it, especially the TV film clips, I talked to one of the curators. He told me that the oldest, wealthiest families in New Orleans had built houses on the best, usually the highest, land. So although 80 per cent of the city had flooded, some of the New Orleans ‘aristocracy’ had escaped, while the poorest parts of the city, largely home to African-American communities, had been hardest hit. And afterwards, it had taken several years to get back to normal. In his view, both in the hours immediately after the storm and in the long-term clean-up, the authorities, both state and federal, had screwed up badly; and the weakest had suffered most.

Of course we did the usual things in New Orleans: the French Quarter, the French Market, Jackson Square (we couldn’t escape the humiliator of the British Army), the Mississippi towpath. That afternoon we walked around the picturesque streets of the Garden District (where I was disappointed not to run into film stars Sandra Bullock and John Goodman, or Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, all supposedly residents of that neighbourhood). And I insisted on visiting the cemetery where part of Easy Rider was filmed. Devotees of the film will remember that in these scenes, having watched the Mardi Gras procession, Wyatt and Billy pick up two girls, go to the cemetery, take acid, and make inappropriate use of the marble chambers in which the dead are entombed in New Orleans (the water table being so high in the city that if coffins were buried in the ground, they would simply float away). As with the Harley-Davidsons, this was another part of the script we lacked the nerve to recreate.

Then on to Sin City, the gambling capital of the world. We really didn’t get Las Vegas. I’ve been there since, for work reasons, and I still don’t get it. We landed there from New Orleans at dusk; from the air, awash with neon, it looked like an exotic glittering piece of jewellery carelessly discarded on the desert floor. But that was the best of it: close up, it was bleak, tawdry, grasping and plain weird. It is, for example, almost impossible to walk outside for any distance on a pavement in Vegas; you can only walk through the shopping malls. Indeed, the entire metropolis appears explicitly designed to separate visitors from their money as quickly as possible. And there are few more dispiriting experiences than wandering through the vast gambling floor of a hotel on the Vegas Strip: endless lines of slot machines, acres of blackjack and roulette tables, an air conditioning system in which air freshener fights a losing battle with the fog of nicotine, and hosts of dead-eyed punters losing their money.

I recognise that this may be a minority view; Vanessa fell into conversation in the hotel lift with a lady of mature years who told her that she visited Vegas three times a year, and always counted the days until her next trip. We had a good evening watching Cirque Du Soleil at the next-door hotel, and enjoyed one quintessential Vegas experience. According to TripAdvisor, the best Italian restaurant in the neighbourhood was in a nearby shopping mall. We duly went there for dinner, to find ourselves in a reimagined shopping street in Italy. The restaurant was located in one corner of someone’s idea of a piazza. We sat and ate some perfectly decent pasta, while above us, the artificial sky darkened and started glinting with fake stars.

We set off the next morning in another rented SUV for the 150-mile sprint eastwards to Springdale, Utah, just across the border with Nevada. Springdale is on the edge of Zion National Park and about ninety minutes from Bryce National Park; and it is Mormon country, having originally been established by a community of Mormon farmers in 1862. It is tiny: according to the last census, its population is 529. But it is also spectacular, surrounded by towering cliffs of red Navajo sandstone. The same red sandstone makes the fifteen-mile Zion Canyon, which we saw the next day, a truly exceptional experience, which we thought couldn’t be matched. But then, the day after, we saw Bryce. Its pink, red and amber phantom-like sandstone rock formations are simply otherworldly, transported from a galaxy far away.

We also had a run-in with Utah’s draconian alcohol licensing laws. It happened to be Thanksgiving. To get into the spirit of this uniquely American holiday, we tried to buy some wine for the evening. This was a problem. It turned out that state laws prohibited supermarkets from selling wine, which could only be purchased from state-run ‘liquor stores’, and the one in Springdale had closed hours earlier. So we ate at a neighbourhood diner at the deeply un-European time of 6 p.m. (their last sitting), and as we paid the bill, we asked whether we could buy some wine to take back to our hotel. The waiter looked deeply troubled and disappeared to consult his boss.

He returned and launched into a negotiation. Where were we going to drink the wine? Our hotel room, we said. This seemed okay. Were we content to carry the wine in a brown bag, and not take it out of the bag while walking down the road? We promised that we could make it the 800 yards back to our hotel without needing alcohol on the way. This also seemed okay. And then came the clincher. They couldn’t open the bottles for us; so if we didn’t have a corkscrew, we would be in trouble. We said this was fine. We didn’t have a corkscrew, but we knew that we could rely on the time-honoured technique, employed by generations of students, of pushing the cork down into the bottle. Honour and local law satisfied, we were allowed our two bottles. And as we discussed on the walk back, we really didn’t mind the interrogation or the local rules; better this than the spectacle of helpless drunks lying on the pavement (as seen in some British town centres on a Friday night). And our wives were thrilled to be asked to produce ID proving they were over twenty-one.

In the event, the wine accompanied our viewing of an American football game, the New England Patriots at the Denver Broncos, so we unwittingly participated in what I now know is an American Thanksgiving tradition. Or at least Nigel and I watched it. As I recall, it was snowing in Denver, and the Broncos won with a dramatic overtime play, a 48-yard touchdown by C. J. Anderson.

We returned to Las Vegas the following day, but went straight to the airport for our flight to Orlando. By that evening, we were on the freeway to Longboat Key, via Sarasota. This final leg was about rest and recreation as much as further exploration: sun, sea, tennis. Nigel and Lou’s apartment overlooked a long, virtually empty, white sand beach with pelicans wheeling past the windows and dolphins ‘team-fishing’ offshore. We knew and liked Sarasota from previous trips. It has some great waterside restaurants, an old-fashioned cinema showing indie films, and a pleasingly laid-back vibe.

Sarasota also has a feature of some fame, or perhaps notoriety. There is a famous photograph, taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt in Times Square on VJ Day, 15 August 1945, of a sailor kissing a nurse. In 2005, the sixtieth anniversary, a man called Seward Johnson created a 25-foot-high statue of the couple, which he called ‘Unconditional Surrender’, and was given permission to place it prominently, but temporarily, on the Sarasota waterfront. In 2007, it was loaned to the Port of San Diego, travelling there on a flatbed truck, which must have been quite a sight on the freeway. It was returned to Sarasota in 2012, in the teeth of some opposition: the then chairwoman of the Public Arts Committee said of it, ‘it doesn’t even qualify as kitsch’. Nevertheless, it has remained, even surviving a car driving into it in 2012; it is now permanently owned by the city, having been bought and donated by a Second World War veteran. It has, however, suffered a more recent mishap. The sailor in the iconic photograph, George Mendonsa, died on 18 February 2019. The next evening, someone sprayed a #MeToo logo on the statue; 1945’s romantic moment had become 2019’s sexual assault.

Our time in Sarasota wasn’t all play. Florida, with its twenty-nine electoral college votes, is the most important swing state in America, so there was value in sniffing the state’s political air. And Sarasota is a leading refuge for Midwesterner ‘snowbirds’, fleeing the bleak northern winters by driving straight down I-75 to Florida’s west coast. The Midwest is where US elections tend to be decided.

So what was in the air? Judging by what I heard, hopes were building around the local boy, Florida senator Marco Rubio (reminding me that he’d also been tipped by some of the Washington pundits at that breakfast at the residence several weeks earlier). But Donald Trump seemed to be everyone’s second choice from the field. These were mostly rich retirees, but Trump’s rhetoric seemed to be connecting with them as much as with the blue-collar classes. The overwhelmingly dominant theme, however, was deep dissatisfaction with President Obama. The apartment block was equipped with gym, swimming pool and tennis courts. I visited the gym most mornings, to hear the other residents complaining about taxes and regulations and government waste. One morning, two of them had an entirely serious conversation about whether Obama was actually a communist. Another morning, the discussion focused on the President’s attendance, a few months previously, at the funeral of Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator killed in a mass shooting at an African-American community church in Charleston. This was the service where Obama memorably broke into ‘Amazing Grace’ during his eulogy. My fellow gym enthusiasts didn’t think Obama would have attended the funeral had the victims been white. Given the hopelessly small size of my survey, I hesitated to draw judgements. But with the benefit of hindsight, the signals were already there that Florida wasn’t going to vote for Obama’s Secretary of State.

I usually can’t sleep on aeroplanes. So as we flew back to London, I had plenty of time to think about the messages I had heard during the trip. I had been to the borderline South (Tennessee); the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana); the West (Nevada and Utah); and Florida. I had scarcely heard a positive word anywhere about Obama, or Hillary Clinton. By contrast, I had heard a lot of approving comments about Donald Trump, and almost nothing about the other Republican candidates. In short, it had been the polar opposite of Washington, where Obama was spoken of with respect and Trump with contempt or derision. America seemed to be two different countries.

But it was the Deep South which left the deepest imprint on me, as it does on so many travellers. An American might say ‘Well, of course; everyone knows what’s been left behind.’ But I simply hadn’t understood the legacy of the Civil War: the memories, the hurt, the bitterness, the defiance and the rewritten history, all contributing to an abiding sense of resentment and separateness, and a distrust of the Northern elites in their Washington and New York fortresses. With a little research, I uncovered what was known as the Lost Cause of The Confederacy: a revisionist ideology which held that the Confederates had been fighting, not to retain slavery, but for their homes, the rights of their states, and the Southern way of life. It reached its peak in the years of the First World War, at the same time that the statue of ‘The Women of the Confederacy’ was being erected in front of the Mississippi State Capitol. And I realised that there were echoes of the Lost Cause in many of the moments of the trip: the tour guide’s heartfelt exposition of Southern victimhood in the Capitol; or the nostalgic, sepia-tinged, account of the history of Natchez presented in its visitor centre. Oscar Wilde, one of my favourite writers, visited America in 1882 for a ‘talking tour’, in which he appeared in 150 cities. He wrote five years later, in ‘The Canterville Ghost’, of ‘the beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance … living on the memory of crushing defeat’.

4
Snowzilla

*

‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’

– Donald Trump, 23 January 2016

*

WE ARRIVED in Washington DC at the start of my posting on the afternoon of Wednesday 20 January; a clear, sunny but cold day, with the temperature hovering around minus 8°C. We spent the evening having supper with some of the senior members of the embassy. The next day was unpacking, meeting the residence team, hearing about the building’s state of disrepair, and walking around the compound. And on Friday morning, I went into the embassy building for the first time as ambassador, to be met by the worried faces of the deputy head of mission and the head of corporate affairs. A monster blizzard was heading towards the north-eastern seaboard, with Washington right in its path. One meteorologist described it somewhat inarticulately as ‘kind of a top-ten snowstorm’. The Washington Post dubbed it ‘Snowzilla’.

The advice from the team was clear and insistent: I should close the embassy at lunchtime to allow staff time to get home before the roads became dangerous. I looked out of the window at the clear blue sky and wondered about the optics of my first decision as ambassador being to close down the embassy. But the same advice was coming in from every direction, with the 24-hour news channels already approaching maximum hysteria: ‘Everyone should get home!’ And I heard that Amanda Downes, the residence social secretary of twenty-eight years’ standing, had taken Vanessa shopping at the local Whole Foods to ‘provision up’ and head off the risk of starvation over the ensuing few days.

So I signed off an email to all staff telling them all to abandon ship and head for the lifeboats. They complied. Meanwhile, the sun continued shining.

But not for long: the sky gradually turned from blue to grey and snow started to fall that Friday afternoon. It was, at first, a few flakes floating prettily to earth, like Hollywood’s concept of Christmas. But through the evening, it increased steadily in ferocity. As we went to bed, we were conscious of a raging blizzard outside. We woke to the extraordinary sight of four feet of snow, lying in drifts against every door in the residence. And the snow was still coming down. Every feature in the residence garden had been obliterated by a thick white blanket. Massachusetts Avenue, in normal times a four-lane artery into the heart of Washington, was silent and unrecognisable; a snowmobile, or a skier, might have made some progress down it, but nothing with wheels.

This was genuinely once-in-a-generation, one of those episodes of Big Weather that characterise the United States. There were tragic consequences; among the more than 100 million people affected by it, there were 55 deaths, including three in Washington. The cost of this officially designated ‘Category 5 Extreme Event’ was estimated at $3 billion.

Inevitably, the snowstorm also generated some knockabout politics. At the time, the Republican presidential primaries were in full swing. Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey (who later became a good friend), was campaigning in New Hampshire, flew back briefly to his state to assess the damage, which by then was more about the risk of flooding from melting snow, but returned almost immediately to the campaign trail. A storm of criticism erupted around his swift exit. A frustrated Christie said to a reporter: ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do, go down there with a mop?’ A New Jersey resident instantly crowd-funded the purchase of 1,000 mops for the governor.

Two of our best friends from my time in Brussels as British ambassador to the European Union were already in Washington when we arrived. David O’Sullivan, the EU ambassador to the US, and his wife Agnes lived about a mile down Massachusetts Avenue from us. We invited them round for supper on Saturday evening, though we wondered whether they would be able to make it through the snowdrifts. They could: they pitched up in full winter gear, wearing ski suits and snowshoes. And they reciprocated, inviting us back on Sunday evening. We lacked the ski gear, but dressed in what was available and set off down a silent and still impassable Massachusetts Avenue. Though the road was still covered in feet of snow, the emergency services had created a narrow pathway, allowing us to walk to the side street where the O’Sullivans lived. We turned off the main road to be greeted by a hill of snow twelve feet high. It took us twenty minutes to climb it and then slide down the other side; ice axes and crampons would have helped. We heard subsequently from David and Agnes that the first house on the street was an outpost of the Russian Embassy. The Russians had hired some private excavators and cleared the snow from the road in front of their building – by pushing it all back down the street. They had thereby opened their way to the main road while creating an impassable obstacle for the rest of the street. I surmised that it wasn’t one of those neighbourhoods where new arrivals were greeted by neighbours bearing meat loaves or pumpkin pies.

We reopened the embassy the following Tuesday, though perhaps a third of the staff were still stranded down impassable roads. I eventually delivered the traditional arrival address to the whole embassy on Thursday, which was followed by an equally traditional drinks party. Life gradually returned to normal, apart from the lingering grey, grubby piles of snow that littered the landscape, melting reluctantly in the frigid air. I started on a round of introductory calls, beginning with the State Department. And within a few days, I found myself presenting my credentials to President Obama at the White House.

‘Letters of credence’, as credentials are more properly known, date back to the fourteenth century. In those days, when an ambassador pitched up at the court of a neighbouring king, there were risks attached. If the relationship had somehow soured during the journey, which would perhaps have lasted months, the ambassador might find himself taken hostage, imprisoned, or even dismembered. The modern generation is fortunate that such practices have largely died out. Ambassadors are now processed by conveyor belt. Most heads of state, at least in the world’s major economies, get through the business of receiving credentials as rapidly as decently possible, by seeing new ambassadors in job lots: no lengthy discussions over refreshments about the state of bilateral relations. So in Washington, a group of the newly arrived is assembled once every few months. Each of them gets sixty seconds, a handshake and a photograph with the President.

I had never actually experienced a credentials ceremony before. There was no such procedure for ambassadors to the European Union, as the EU was not a country, despite the superstate dreams of the Brussels idealists. Unsure what exactly I was meant to be doing, I was completely unprepared for the photograph and so was captured in a robotic pose, looking somewhat uncomfortable. The result was Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, with much accompanying ribaldry on social media.

I avoided the Twitterstorm by immersing myself in a succession of meetings to learn about the embassy. Washington, as the capital of the most powerful country in the world and our strongest ally, was rightly regarded as having the most important bilateral British diplomatic mission. It had more than 450 staff, divided into 22 teams, and oversaw a network twice that size, with consulates (which nowadays are more about trade than lost passports) in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco, and pure trade offices in Denver, Minneapolis, Raleigh, San Diego and Seattle. The embassy connected to every department of government in the UK, and got involved in pretty much every conceivable aspect of the UK–US relationship. Around half of the embassy staff were Americans (‘locally engaged’, in the Foreign Office jargon), including the entire congressional liaison team and two-thirds of my private office; coming from all parts of the country, they brought invaluable knowledge and understanding. The biggest single section was the 150-strong defence team. Their tasks included looking after the welfare of the several hundred British servicemen and women embedded in the US armed forces, overseeing the dozens of joint US and UK equipment and technology projects, and managing the day-to-day interactions necessitated by our forces’ joint operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I quickly discovered that, somewhere in the embassy, there was someone covering each and every conceivable interaction between the UK and the US, from British nationals on death row to future trade deals and everything in between.

I started to think about how I should spend my time, given that there were three or four options for every hour of life as British ambassador to the US. First, it was election year. We needed to get alongside the leading campaigns, build relationships with the main advisers, and provide London with a constant flow of insights and analysis; crucially, material that they weren’t reading in media reports. Second, supporting British business had to be one of the highest priorities. National wealth is created by the private sector, not by government; and 19 per cent of total British exports go to the US, by a long way our largest bilateral market. So I told the commercial team that I would see any senior visiting British businessman who was coming through Washington, and that I would host at the residence any export promotion events they wanted to put my way. Third, I resolved to spend two afternoons a week in Congress, seeing senators and congressmen; more time with them than some of my predecessors had spent, but I reckoned it would be repaid, sooner or later.

I also recognised that I had to get out of Washington and around the country, as I had learnt on my road trip. DC wasn’t America, there were eight consulates to visit, and I was personally intrigued to visit Silicon Valley and the headquarters of the internet giants. Beyond this, I knew that each week was bound to be filled with the normal business of bilateral diplomacy: a steady stream of senior ministers and officials visiting from London, and the daily task of understanding, assessing, reporting and, most important of all, building the relationships which would enable me to intervene on any aspect of US federal and state activity that had implications for British interests.

That was the day job. There were also the evenings. Washington comes alive at night. And the British ambassador is in the fortunate, if demanding, position of being invited to pretty much everything. I got into the habit of spending an hour a week with Amanda Downes and the private office team, deciding which of the dozens of invitations I received each week should be accepted – and often, how many different events could be crammed into one night. There was a real art to this, and I was seriously lucky in having Amanda at the table. In particular, she warned us against accepting all but a handful of a Washington speciality, the ‘charity gala dinner’. The best of these could be spectacular. The worst were a deadly combination of endless speeches preceding a meal of shoe-leather steak, followed by more speeches stretching into the late hours. Throughout my diplomatic career, I had reckoned that if I didn’t get at least a couple of insights worth reporting back to London from each and every evening event, then I had been wasting my time. Thanks in part to Amanda’s judicious advice about which invitations to accept, and in part to Washington being the most political, and gossipy, of cities, the problem became, not collecting worthwhile insights, but finding the time to report all of them, so rich an environment was the Washington social circuit.

And then there was the residence. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, considered the greatest British architect of his age, and completed in 1928, this was a building designed for parties – whether an intimate dinner for a dozen in the smaller of the two dining rooms, a reception for 350 in the ballroom (under a portrait of the Queen by Andy Warhol), or a garden party for 600 to celebrate a royal wedding. Adding together breakfasts, lunches, receptions and dinners, Vanessa and I found ourselves hosting some 800 events a year there; and thanks to a brilliant head chef and his team, as well as an accomplished front-of-house operation, it ran like a well-oiled machine.

The biggest of these 800 events was the annual embassy open day. There was a Washington tradition that all the embassies opened their doors to the public over a couple of Saturdays in May. For us, this had become, over the years, a Cecil B. de Mille style spectacular. Jaguar, Bentley and Rolls-Royce displayed their latest models. There were stalls showcasing British food and drink. The residence was decked out for a black-tie dinner. The Washington Shakespeare Company performed extracts of his plays on the terrace. The rose garden looked at its most glamorous. Local TV news film crews roamed the compound. On a sunny day, around 10,000 people would come through the gates, producing a queue half a mile up Massachusetts Avenue.

The first year, I lingered for a while near the Jaguars, eventually sitting in one for the benefit of a TV crew. I noticed among the thousands of visitors a young man, studying me with intent. As I clambered out of the car, he approached me and asked for a photograph with me. I readily agreed. He then said, ‘I really love your show. When’s the next season?’ I asked who he thought I was. He said, ‘Aren’t you Jeremy Clarkson?’ I explained that I was someone far less important than the presenter of Top Gear, namely the ambassador. Did he still want a photograph? Looking mildly embarrassed, he said, ‘Yeah, okay then,’ did the selfie thing, and vanished. One of the embassy staff overheard: by Monday, several thousand people knew the story.

The Foreign Office also required us to make the residence generate income by hiring it out commercially. So we found ourselves hosting everything from company boards to gala dinners. The one disadvantage to this otherwise lucrative practice was that a short speech by the ambassador came as part of the package. So I found myself speaking about an extraordinary range of subjects to a highly varied range of audiences. Night after night, I gave silent thanks to a succession of creative speechwriters. And most nights, as the guests filed out, dazzled by the grandeur of their surroundings, I wondered what they would think if they knew that, thanks to decades of under-investment, the fabric of the building was in a parlous state. There were leaks whenever it rained, floods whenever a pipe failed, misbehaving fire alarms, periodic power cuts, and unreliable lifts. Late one evening, Vanessa was trapped in a lift for fifty minutes. Dodgy lifts are a feature of British residences worldwide; there was a similarly troublesome example in the Brussels residence, though my jamming it by stuffing a redundant Christmas tree in it one January may not have helped.

We started to settle into a pattern of life. Vanessa had also started work as a teacher at the British International School of Washington. (She had worked throughout every posting of my career, finding it kept her grounded and gave her a life outside mine.) So we rose at 6 a.m., Vanessa to get ready for her 7.30 start, while I caught up on the US news and the emails from London. Vanessa had a short walk through the woods and I did the thirty-second commute to the embassy at about 8 a.m., unless there was a working breakfast, and spent most days on a combination of meetings, video conferences and calls. Vanessa got back to the residence at about 5 p.m., giving her an hour’s turnaround before the evening event. I generally went straight from work. If it was one event, we might be home by 8 p.m.; if two or three, 10 p.m. or later. In short, it amounted to an extraordinarily interesting and rewarding life; but also to an unending and sometimes exhausting succession of fifteen-hour days.

Within a couple of months of our arrival, the residence acquired two additional occupants. Vanessa took on two rescued Washington street cats, which she named Monty and Pico (both names inherited from former occupants of the family cat position). The rescue charity carefully vetted the residence and gardens for their suitability for homeless cats before releasing them to us. They became well-known figures around the compound, and indeed in the New Zealand Embassy next door and the Naval Observatory across the road – the latter the official residence of Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen. The cats even took to following Vanessa on her walk through the woods to school. Sadly, Pico was killed on Massachusetts Avenue a couple of years later. Monty, however, thrived, and stayed on after our departure, in the care of the residence manager. He developed into an exceptionally effective – that is, lethal – hunter. We came home one evening to discover he had dragged a rabbit through the cat flap into the kitchen, there to dismember it – leaving entrails on the carpet and splashes of blood halfway up the walls. Mrs Pence famously kept rabbits; and I pondered briefly, but dismissed, the notion that Monty’s victim was one of hers. As I swabbed the blood from the kitchen walls, however, it did occur to me that it was a fitting metaphor for the political times in Washington.

At the weekends, we started to get to know the city. To a Londoner, it feels compact; in the car, in some directions, one can be out of it in twenty minutes. Perhaps appropriately, as the capital city of the melting pot that is America, it is a mash-up of architectural styles, from the neoclassicism of the Capitol, the White House and Union Station through the Norman style of the Smithsonian, the gothic revivalism of the National Cathedral, all the way to the African influences in the extraordinary new Museum of African American History on the Mall (designed, as it happens, by a brilliant British architect, David Adjaye). It is also a strikingly low-rise city, thanks to the Height of Buildings Act of 1910. This restricts buildings in business areas to 110 feet in height, and those in residential areas to a mere 90 feet. But most of all, we enjoyed walking around the quiet, leafy nineteenth-century streets of old Georgetown, some fifteen minutes’ walk from the residence. Or at least, we usually did: there is one month when those streets should be avoided. The streets are full of ginkgo trees. But they planted females, not males; and for a month in autumn, the pavements are covered in seeds from the trees – which smell, precisely and disconcertingly, of vomit.

Those first weeks passed in a blur of social gatherings – save three events which remain in the memory. The first was a Washington institution called the Alfalfa Club. Though it is called a club, it meets but once each year, on the last Saturday in January, for a black-tie dinner at the Capitol Hilton. Its membership is a combination of corporate America and Washington politics. Its proceedings are, in sharp contrast to the more famous White House Correspondents’ Dinner, entirely private. But they are similar in the sense that the entertainment comprises a series of theoretically humorous and disrespectful speeches. The club’s name is a tribute to the alfalfa plant, which has an exceptionally wide-reaching root system, designed to capture all available moisture; a plant, in other words, that is willing ‘to do anything for a drink’. It was founded in 1913, by four Southerners, to celebrate the birthday of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. It didn’t admit African Americans until 1974, and women until 1994. The serving President would always be invited. Sportingly, President Obama attended twice, in 2009 and 2012. In his 2009 speech to the dinner, Obama noted that ‘if General Lee were here with us tonight, at this dinner in his honour, he would be 202 years old. And very confused.’

So I pitched up for my first Alfalfa, to be greeted by a sea of faces including many of the most famous corporate figures in America; from the giants of Wall Street to the stars of Silicon Valley. I was one of about a dozen ambassadors in attendance, and we were treated mysteriously well. At a certain point in the pre-dinner drinks, we were selected out and ushered into a ‘VIP area’, from which Wall Street and Silicon Valley were excluded; only ambassadors and senior American politicians were allowed entry. Hence mysterious; anywhere to which I am allowed access while, say, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are excluded has to be strange. As I walked in to this exclusive gathering, I could scarcely believe my eyes: among the twenty or so people there were two former Presidents, George H. W. Bush (in a wheelchair) and George W. Bush; several senior White House figures including presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett; and a sprinkling of cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State John Kerry. I gleefully made the rounds, picked up what gossip I could, and sent an email to London on Monday morning, beginning ‘I talked to both George Bushes, John Kerry and Valerie Jarrett on Saturday night …’

A week or so later, there was the National Prayer Breakfast, traditionally held on the first Thursday in February. By comparison with Alfalfa, this was a newcomer, having been founded by President Eisenhower in 1953 with the encouragement of the Reverend Billy Graham. But it is the bigger event, with more than 2,000 guests packed into the Washington Hilton’s largest room, several hundred more in an overflow room, a handful of visiting heads of state, and live coverage on national TV. It also always gets a keynote speech from the President.

I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the vast auditorium in the hotel basement. But in fact, it was exactly what it said on the tin: a range of national figures, mostly politicians, but also Church leaders, leading a series of prayers. Obama gave a brilliant, deeply personal speech, in part about his relationship with his daughters. It reminded me that, at his best, Obama had few equals as a public speaker. The unexpected highlight, however, was the performance of the two unannounced ‘mystery speakers’. These turned out to be Mark Burnett, a TV producer, and Roma Downey, an actress.

Had I been in America longer, I might have known that these were national figures. Downey played the angel (yes, really) in a long-running TV show, Touched by an Angel; and Burnett was a giant of TV production, having invented two hugely successful TV shows, Survivor and The Apprentice, in the latter casting as the CEO figure an aspiring TV star called Donald Trump. They gave a confident and professional performance, and I was struck in particular at hearing a British accent from the podium. Mark Burnett had been born in London and had served in the Parachute Regiment, including during the Falklands War, before emigrating to the United States in 1982. I emailed him later that day to congratulate him on his performance and to say how nice it had been to see a Brit as the star speaker at such a quintessentially American event.

Then, a month after my arrival at the embassy, I had my first taste of American election campaigns. The first two events on the Republican calendar, the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, had been and gone, with Donald Trump winning both, in continuing defiance of the Washington pundits. The next primary was South Carolina. Vanessa and I flew down to the state capital, Columbus, on the day of the vote. We had lunch with the local Republican Party representatives. They insisted we eat catfish, which was apparently caught by being wrestled by hand out of muddy riverbanks. They were outstanding (the Republicans, that is – the catfish was okay): friendly, frank, full of insights. We then talked that afternoon to some of the journalists covering the primary. Everyone thought Trump would nail a hat-trick of successes, but there was uncertainty over the margin of victory and the order of the runners-up. And no one, especially not the local Republicans, seemed happy. They didn’t like the tone of the Trump campaign, and they didn’t see him as a proper Republican.

The tradition is that every campaign, whether winning or losing, holds a party (sort of; warm beer in plastic cups) as the results come in. The Trump campaigners were holed up somewhere else in South Carolina, a fair distance from Columbus. So Vanessa and I and the embassy political team went to the Marco Rubio event. Rubio was a young, charismatic, good-looking senator from Florida, with a striking back story. His father had fled Cuba in the 1950s and worked as a bartender, initially in Nevada, then in Miami. A lot of knowledgeable people thought Rubio had a real chance of winning the Republican nomination.

In the event, he never came close to challenging Trump. His candidacy was effectively destroyed by Chris Christie. At the televised debate preceding the New Hampshire vote, Christie, a gifted exponent of bare-knuckle politics, metaphorically beat Rubio up, accusing him of spouting vacuous, pre-programmed, robotic soundbites. A flustered Rubio was prompted into responding with some words best described as, well, vacuous, pre-programmed, robotic soundbites. When I heard this, I felt a stab of sympathy for Rubio, given my own trial by Twitter a few weeks earlier; we robots had to stick together. That said, Rubio actually ran second in South Carolina, prompting an upbeat mood at the event I attended. Rubio spent a few minutes with me and the team, and then delivered a speech to the assembled crowd that would have been spot on had he actually won the primary rather than come second. But it was a false dawn; a few weeks later, after being ridiculed by Christie, losing his home state of Florida to Trump, and having run out of money, Rubio pulled out.

The big news, however, from South Carolina, apart from Trump’s third victory, concerned another candidate. Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s younger brother, had been a successful governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. As George W. Bush’s presidency began to fall apart under the pressures of failure in Iraq, senior Republicans could be heard increasingly to say ‘we got the wrong Bush’. So when Jeb announced his candidacy for President in June 2015, money poured in (some $100 million). He immediately became front runner. But that was as good as it got. Of his campaign, it was said ‘he never walked without stumbling’. Once under the national spotlight, he emerged as a clunky, uninspiring public speaker and a diffident, nervous performer in debate. In particular, he couldn’t cope with Donald Trump, looking like a deer in the headlights whenever Trump attacked him. Trump dubbed him ‘low energy Jeb’; Bush never got close to an effective response. Some debaters have an instinct to go for the jugular; Jeb’s habitual response was to deliver the harmless glancing blow.

So by the time the Bush campaign reached South Carolina, it was the land of the last chance saloon. I was due to call on both Bush and on the senator for South Carolina, Lindsay Graham, that afternoon. Both cancelled at short notice. I was told that they were in conference, with Graham providing some campaign advice and analysis. If this was true, then Graham’s advice must have been sharp-edged; Bush withdrew from the presidential race the next day.

A few weeks later, I went down to see Jeb Bush in his Florida office. He gave me a lot of his time, spoke freely and frankly, and came across as a transparently decent human being and a serious policy thinker. But he also looked and sounded like he had been hit by a truck. He fretted about letting down his team by being such a weak candidate. He worried about the Republicans becoming the anti-immigration party on the back of Trump’s success. He said he had spent decades building support for the Republican Party in the Latino community, only to see Trump destroy it in a few months. But most of all, he seemed shattered by the experience of the campaign: his precipitous fall from front runner to roadkill in the space of a few months. And the anger was still there. As I left, he said, ‘Trump may win the nomination. But you can be sure of this. He will not win the presidency.’

Back in Washington from the South Carolina primary, and just over a month into my posting, I wrote to London with my first considered assessment of the presidential race. On the Democratic contest, I predicted that Hillary Clinton was likely to win, but noted that she was facing much tougher opposition than anyone had expected from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders, who described himself as a democratic socialist, and who looked to me disconcertingly like Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films, had virtually dead-heated with Clinton in Iowa, and had then convincingly won New Hampshire; but had been blown out of the water in South Carolina, where the African-American community voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

As for the Republicans, I wrote that Trump had been underestimated throughout his presidential run; that ‘the likeliest outcome’ was that he would win the Republican nomination; that Clinton was damaged goods with serious likeability and trust issues; and that it was therefore conceivable that Trump would go on to win the presidency. For the record, this judgement was made on 25 February 2016.

5
The Brexit Vote

*

‘I think it’s a very great thing that has happened … basically, they took back their country’

– presidential candidate Donald Trump, 24 June 2016

*

‘WHAT YOU need to do now is develop a career anchor.’

These words of advice came from a friend in the human resources department of the Foreign Office. His point was well judged. After twelve years in the office, I had been a junior press spokesman; I had spent four years in Japan, but not as a language specialist; I had done two years running the Channel Tunnel treaty negotiations; and I was in the middle of three years as senior private secretary to the minister of state dealing with the Middle East. Meanwhile, my colleagues had been learning ‘hard’ languages like Chinese and Arabic, and developing career specialisations. Having early in my career achieved a historically low score in the hard language aptitude test, none of this was for me; I had instead been following an enjoyable but utterly random path.

I pondered these words and, a few weeks later, talked to him again. I said that I wanted to become a specialist in the European Community – the EC, as it was known around the system. He was taken aback. This was a career path that tended to involve future postings in Brussels; pleasant enough but no one’s idea of a glamorous city. And it had the reputation around the corridors of being a sixty-hour-a-week grind, mostly spent in airless conference rooms negotiating the widgets directive. So there wasn’t much of a queue at the door for this particular career path. But I told him that I liked the idea of negotiating for a living; and that I thought the European Community was ‘the future’, in that it would come to play an increasingly large role in British politics and governance. As we talked it over, he started to agree.

When I finished as private secretary a few months later, there wasn’t anything available in Brussels. So I was asked to go to Rome as first secretary (EC and Economic). This involved a course on economics of, well, all of four and a half days – leading my colleagues to dub me ‘the Economic Miracle’ when I subsequently opined on the subject. It also involved a month in Florence learning Italian, and then three years of living in an extraordinary apartment in the sixteenth-century English College, the Venerabile Collegio Inglese for trainee Catholic priests, in the Centro Storico, the ancient heart of Rome: hardship piled upon hardship. The college had a picturesque history; and our showcase high-ceilinged apartment was where, back in the 1700s, the most famous British visitors, including in 1635 Thomas Hobbes, the English political philosopher, would stay before making the short walk to the Vatican. Just as our days in Rome were drawing to an end, we learnt that the apartment was rumoured to be haunted. It was as well that Vanessa hadn’t discovered this earlier. As for me, looking back, I rather warm to the idea that the ghosts of illustrious guests of the past are still roaming those corridors. If Hobbes is amongst them, he must be gratified that his concept of the absolute leader, wielding supreme and unchecked power over his subjects, has such notable modern-day adherents.

After a joyous three years of la dolce vita, I returned to London as deputy head of the European Union Department. I subsequently took time out from what was now known, post-Maastricht Treaty, as the EU, the European Union, to lead the department dealing with the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Bosnia war; and then a couple of years as the Foreign Secretary’s press spokesman. But after that, it was back to the EU for more than a decade: director of the Foreign Office European departments: then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Europe adviser: and then over four years as British ambassador to the European Union.

The Foreign Office is somewhat lazily characterised in parts of the British media as a den of crazed Europhiles, eager to sell out their country if it contributes to the next stage of the construction of the European superstate. The reality is that there are both enthusiasts and sceptics inside the machine – both remainers and leavers, in these more tribal days – though it would be a fair guess that remainers are the majority. I personally was, and am, neither a sceptic nor a super-enthusiast. I took the pragmatic view that, overall, it served British interests to be part of the European project.

I felt this in particular because I had grown up during an era of seemingly relentless British decline, culminating in the three-day week of 1974 and then the uncollected rubbish and the unburied bodies of the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent. In comparison with these convulsions, Europe had seemed to be flourishing. I thought that the single market, essentially a British idea, was one of the greatest projects of the twentieth century. I felt equally strongly about the EU offering membership to central and Eastern European states, a project to which I felt I had contributed by chairing the EU Enlargement Working Group during the British EU presidency of 1998 (the ‘presidency’ of the European Union rotates among the member states, each getting six months). But I also recognised what a strange, ‘un-British’ construction was the European Commission. I despaired at times about the lowest common denominator outcomes of internal EU negotiations. And I thought that the British Treasury had a point in its critique of the euro: that it wouldn’t work without a single fiscal and budgetary policy across the single currency zone, and large-scale financial transfers from the richer regions to the poorer. I was also conscious, however, that, for our European partners, the European project was about much more than trade and economics. Only a generation or two earlier, they had lived through two world wars, with millions killed and their cities destroyed. Indeed, the entire history of Europe had been one of wars between neighbours. So their attachment to the ideals and ambitions of building Europe was rooted in history. It was emotional as well as intellectual, and was fundamentally about peace and security, and an end to war in Europe forever.

Whatever my mixed feelings about the characteristics and policies of the European Union, I thought from the outset, privately, that the Cameron proposition of holding a referendum on membership of the European Union was seriously risky. I could see a lot wrong with the EU. I could sense the mounting unhappiness within the Conservative Party. No one could miss the rise of UKIP. All of us British officials working in Brussels would, on occasion, become incensed at the seemingly magisterial powers of unelected Commission officials, especially when their proposals were wrong-headed, as with the catastrophically misguided Working Time Directive of the 1990s. A decade later, the Eurozone became a low growth disaster area after the 2008 financial crisis. And members of the euro responded to that crisis as if they were a privileged inner court within the EU, entitled to take decisions without recourse to the views of the rest. But overall, it was still, surely, in our interests to work for reform from within? And what if we lost?

David Cameron has written about his thought processes before making his famous announcement on an EU referendum at Bloomberg’s London headquarters in January 2013. He relates that he concluded that the best way of keeping the UK within the EU was to renegotiate the terms of our membership, get a better deal, then put the question to the British people and win the argument, settling the Europe issue for party and country for a generation. I worked for Cameron for almost four years. I thought he was a seriously talented politician, streets ahead of his contemporaries as a leader; that he made a lot of good, often brave, decisions; and that he was a thoroughly decent human being. But I have never accepted the argument that the referendum was unavoidable and unstoppable – that it was somehow written in the stars. The fact was that we had negotiated for ourselves a privileged form of EU membership, full of British exceptionalism: Mrs Thatcher’s rebate, our unique permanent exclusion from the euro, and our partial exclusion from those bits of Schengen, ‘Europe without Frontiers’, that we didn’t like. In short, we had managed to get ourselves effectively the best of both worlds; the advantages of membership, absent the obligations we didn’t like, and with a special discount on costs. But then, as a civil servant, I have never had to run for election and navigate the tides of public opinion.

Whatever my personal feelings on the issue, I arrived in Washington with the referendum only six months away, with the renegotiation of our EU membership in full swing, and with a US administration frankly puzzled about why the British government had decided, from choice not necessity, to take such a huge risk. On my round of introductory calls, I would be asked repeatedly, ‘Can you just explain again why you are doing this?’ I would use the approved lines, which centred on the supposedly unstoppable public pressure for a vote, given how much the European project had changed from the one they had supported in the 1975 referendum. I could tell from their body language that none of the Obama team bought this; and I could readily imagine the US Embassy in London reporting that the referendum promise had been about heading off the UKIP threat in the 2015 election, and that Europe never featured in polls listing the top ten concerns of the British electorate. The more assertive of my contacts would then say, ‘We really need you inside the EU, so we trust you will win this.’ I tried to reassure them: winning was the plan.

The concerns of the Obama team were real. But in telling us how important we were to them, there was an element of flattery. I vividly recall an informal drink with a friend from the Obama team, who revealed that on a lot of European business, their first call was to Berlin: Merkel was seen as the one calling the shots, while we were perceived to be somewhat marginalised. The areas where we ranked ahead of the Germans were wider international affairs, especially defence and security. But even here, our reputation had been tarnished by the British Parliament’s vote, in August 2013, against UK involvement in proposed air strikes against President Assad’s forces in Syria, following his use of chemical weapons against his own people. That said, they were ready to help. And there was an opportunity coming with a presidential visit to London in April 2016.

This was to be Obama’s last trip to London as President. The Obamas got on famously with the royal family, so the programme involved a private lunch with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and a private dinner with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (where the photos of the US President meeting two-year-old Prince George made front pages everywhere). With Cameron, there was an afternoon meeting and a big press conference in one of the Foreign Office’s grand conference rooms. I worked with Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, and Jeff Zients, his economic adviser, on the agenda for the talks. Jeff asked me whether the Prime Minister would want the President to say anything at the press conference about the referendum. I said I thought it was likely that he would; that in any case, the President was bound to be asked about it at the press conference; but that the precise words would have to be for discussion between the two of them.

In the event, unsurprisingly, the referendum was the first, and dominant, subject of the discussion. Obama had already written a piece for the Daily Telegraph saying that, while the decision was a matter for British voters, the EU magnified British influence across the world. Cameron set out how the Remain campaign were doing, conveying simultaneously that it was close, but that he was confident of winning. The discussion turned to the arguments of the Leave campaign, in particular their claim that the single market could be replaced by a multiplicity of free trade deals around the world, including with the United States. Obama said that, given the much bigger markets with which deals could be done, he couldn’t see a free trade deal between the US and the UK being a priority. George Osborne suggested he say something to that effect during the press conference.

At the end of the meeting, we duly walked across to the Foreign Office, and into a Locarno Room packed with journalists. When the moment came, Obama said: ‘I think it’s fair to say that maybe, some point down the line, there might be a UK–US trade agreement; but it’s not going to happen any time soon, because our focus is in negotiating with a big bloc, the European Union, to get a trade agreement done, and the UK is going to be in the back of the queue. Not because we don’t have a special relationship, but because, given the heavy lift on any trade agreement, we need to be having access to a big market with a lot of countries rather than trying to do piecemeal trade agreements, which is hugely inefficient.’

As the Obama convoy left the Foreign Office, the heavens opened, leaving us in the UK team wondering whether it was an ill omen. The President’s words on a trade deal immediately captured the news cycle, leading all the TV news bulletins and most front pages the following morning. The Leave campaign reacted angrily. Dominic Raab, then justice minister, said that he didn’t believe Obama’s comments would reflect future US trade policy, and that ‘what you had here was a lame duck American President doing an old British friend a political favour’. Boris Johnson, at the time in his last days as mayor of London, called Obama ‘hypocritical’. Nigel Farage said he was the most anti-British American President ever. Some in the British media, noting that Obama had said ‘back of the queue’ rather than the more American ‘back of the line’, speculated that the Prime Minister had given him a script. I was there: he didn’t. The choice of words was Obama’s own.

Over the ensuing months, I would be asked many times by members of Obama’s team whether the President’s intervention had been counter-productive. Some of the instant opinion polls after the visit suggested that more people in the UK had been offended than had supported his words; other polls suggested it was fifty-fifty. Personally, I thought ‘back of the queue’ was a little harsh and sharp-edged; a softer formulation would have been better. But I also think that it made no difference one way or the other. People weren’t interested in ‘technicalities’ like trade deals; they were voting to punish the Establishment.

The Obama visit stirred up a new wave of US interest in the referendum. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were asked about it. Clinton sided with Obama: her senior policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, told the Observer that she ‘valued a strong United Kingdom in a strong European Union’. Trump took the opposite view. He said to Fox News, ‘I know Great Britain very well. I have a lot of investments there. I would say that they’re better off without the EU. But I want them to make their own decision.’ All of this was as expected. Whitehall took it entirely calmly. They took it less serenely, however, when we picked up rumours that Trump would be visiting the UK at around the time of the actual vote, on 23 June. We were asked to check with the Trump camp. It turned out that he was indeed visiting, for personal and business reasons; he would be presiding over a ceremony to mark the relaunch of one of his two Scottish golf courses, Trump Turnberry, after a £200 million redevelopment. But, we learnt, he would be flying overnight and not arriving until the morning of 24 June, after the polls had closed. So no campaigning; the Foreign Office calmed down. Until, that is, they realised the next question coming down the track: should the Prime Minister offer him a meeting?

There was form between Donald Trump and David Cameron. Back at the beginning of the year, in the context of Trump’s campaign-trail rhetoric attacking Muslims, Cameron had said, when challenged at Prime Minister’s Questions, that Trump’s words were ‘stupid, divisive and wrong’. He had also said, however, after Trump had nailed down his party’s nomination, that ‘anyone who makes it through the primary process deserves respect’. And somewhat uncharacteristically, Trump hadn’t really retaliated to Cameron’s criticism of his comments on Muslims. As for the possible meeting, the thoroughly sensible line that emerged from No. 10 was that the Prime Minister would in principle of course be ready to see Donald Trump, as was the tradition with visiting US presidential candidates. We in the embassy were, however, asked to talk privately to the Trump team to warn them that, if they asked for a call on 24 June, the Prime Minister might be rather busy. Prescient words, as it turned out, though not for the reasons we might have hoped.

I had fallen into the habit of checking in with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, every few weeks through the campaign, ostensibly so I could have some inside knowledge when talking to the White House, but also just because I wanted to know how things were. Ed was entirely consistent throughout: he always sounded extremely worried. He told me that the private polls from the Northern and Midlands towns were ‘terrible’. He was deeply critical of the leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, for his failure to do any serious campaigning in the Labour Party heartlands. He said to me, once or twice, ‘We can lose this, you know.’

So perhaps I should have been better prepared when a group of us from the embassy assembled at my deputy’s house on the evening of 23 June to watch the results come in. Instructions had, incidentally, gone out from the centre to the entire diplomatic network that there should be no public ‘watch parties’, so there were no outside guests. But the final opinion polls, or at least those that I saw, suggested that Remain had recovered a narrow lead. And I was guessing that all of the warnings about the implications of leaving for the economy, for jobs and for incomes, would prey on people’s minds as they went into the privacy of the polling booth. A British friend had emailed me a sort of ready reckoner for the results, a constituency-by-constituency table showing what the figures should be if the final opinion polls were right.

At about 7 p.m. Washington time the results started to flow. It was the Sunderland result that rocked me back. I knew the town from my time at Durham University; I used to go and watch the Sunderland football team play at Roker Park, long since demolished to make way for the optimistically named Stadium of Light. In those days, Sunderland had been the epitome of post-industrial decline. Once known as ‘the largest shipbuilding town in the world’, with more than four hundred shipyards, by the Seventies it was better known for its appallingly high unemployment rate. Standing in the upper reaches of the football stadium, I could look out over rows and rows of terraced houses towards abandoned shipyards, and beyond to a grey, bleak North Sea. Sunderland’s luck had turned, however: it was revitalised through being chosen, in 1984, as the location for the first Nissan car plant in Europe. The plant is still thriving, now making a best-selling electric car. Most of its output goes to Europe.

Sunderland was nevertheless expected to vote Leave, but by a majority of about 6 per cent. The returning officer, on live TV, announced a result that sounded instantly way out of line with that estimate. A quick calculation showed a Leave vote of 61 per cent, as against Remain at 39 per cent. A longstanding British friend of mine happened to be one of the country’s top pollsters, a regular on BBC election nights. I texted him to ask what I should make of Sunderland. He texted back almost immediately to say that he thought it was an outlier, and that later results would be more in line with the pre-vote opinion polls.

They weren’t. The Newcastle result was another killer. And throughout Northern and Midland cities, Leave was winning by huge margins, approaching 70–30 in some cases. I knew that London and the South-East were expected to vote heavily for Remain. But I started to question whether it would be enough. Then my pollster friend texted again to say that he was ‘now much less confident about the accuracy of the polling data and the final result’.

We didn’t stay much longer at the gathering. I thought I could see the lie of the land. But I also thought that it would be hours before the result was certain. At 4 a.m., however, I woke and knew I had to catch up on the news. I went through to the study, where my phone was charging. I pressed the Home button. The screen flashed: ‘David Cameron announces his resignation as Prime Minister’.

Further sleep being impossible, I was early in the embassy that morning. There must have been colleagues who had voted Leave, as they had every right to do. But no one was skipping down the corridors. People looked shocked. The atmosphere was funereal. One or two were in tears. I did a quick all-staff meeting, at which I set out what I thought would happen next, including that David Cameron would stay on as caretaker Prime Minister until a successor had been chosen through that convoluted two-stage Conservative Party process. And I emphasised that, however individuals felt about the outcome, whether jubilation or despair, the face we should present to the outside world was one of calm acceptance of the result and confidence about the future: this had been democracy in action. Fortunately, it was a Friday, with the weekend beckoning. By the following Monday, the mood had lightened a bit.

As for the world outside the embassy gates, a rare thing was happening; the UK was leading the US news. There were dozens of requests for me to do interviews; the instruction from London to every one of us around the network, however, was that we should decline all bids, at least for the moment, and let the Prime Minister’s words from Downing Street speak for themselves.

David Cameron phoned President Obama later that day. As he himself has recorded, he told Obama that he’d had a strategy to keep the UK in the EU, that he’d executed it, that it hadn’t worked and that he was sorry. I didn’t listen to the call, but the subsequent record showed that Obama had replied in classily empathetic terms. Within a day or two, however, I was hearing from friendly White House journalists that the private reaction inside the building was much harsher, with the President asking his staff, ‘How could Cameron even ask the question without being sure of the answer he would get?’ Or as one of the White House team put it to me: ‘we think you guys are screwed’.

A different line was, however, emerging on home soil. Donald Trump had landed in Scotland and had arrived at Turnberry, to be met by a small crowd of onlookers and a large crowd of journalists and cameras. An hour after Cameron had announced his resignation, Trump was doing an impromptu press conference in front of the Turnberry clubhouse. He said: ‘I think it’s a great thing that happened, an amazing vote, very historic. Basically, they took their country back.’ On David Cameron, he said, ‘He’s a good man, but he didn’t get the mood of his country right.’ Asked why Leave had won, he replied: ‘People are angry. They are angry over borders, they are angry over people coming into the country and taking over and nobody even noticing. They are angry about many, many things.’ On the European Union, he said that break-up ‘looks like it’s on its way’. He observed that lots of Germans, some of whom were ‘members of Mar-a-Lago’ – the Trump-owned Florida resort – had told him they were leaving Germany ‘because of the tremendous influx of people’. And asked about the implications of the vote for the British economy, he said, ‘When the pound goes down, more people are coming to Turnberry, frankly.’

In short, it was vintage Trump: outspoken, opinionated, dismissive of contrary views, occasionally unattached to the facts, but also newsworthy and crystal clear; no one could wonder afterwards where exactly he stood on the issues. And approve of the underlying thought or not, there was undoubtedly truth in his assertion that immigration had been a central issue in the referendum outcome. There was, however, one notable false step. Trump tweeted on arriving in Scotland: ‘Place is going wild over the vote. They took their country back, just like we will take America back!’ Almost right: Scotland voted by 62 per cent to 38 per cent to remain in the EU.

6
The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump

*

‘Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it’

– presidential candidate Donald Trump’s speech to the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, 21 July 2016

*

MID-MAY, AND I was hosting a small lunch in the Residence for a combination of visitors from London and some senior Republican Party figures. None of the latter were Trump supporters: some would later sign the ‘Never Trump’ letter. Their biggest concern was around foreign policy: Trump seemed to be a Putin admirer; he saved much of his harshest criticism for America’s allies and partners; and he didn’t believe in free trade. In short, they didn’t think he was really a Republican. I asked whether these could be tactical positions, adopted for the campaign, to be discarded if elected? To my surprise, one of the Brits dissented vigorously, arguing that Trump had always held these views. And he directed me to a YouTube clip as proof.

I tracked down the clip that evening. It was from a BBC TV chat show, hosted by the British equivalent of Johnny Carson, one Terry Wogan. The guests comprised of Donald Trump, his first wife, Ivana, and Dame Edna Everage (the Australian comedian, Barry Humphries, in drag). Trump was there to promote his book Art of the Deal. Dame Edna was there to lampoon the other guests, at one point saying to Trump: ‘The book is wonderful. It’s very entertaining. It’s got lovely photographs of you two adorable young people. I love the one of you standing there caressing your skyscraper.’

Mid-interview, Wogan asked Trump whether there was truth in the rumours that he has political ambitions. Trump said: ‘Well, I hate to see what’s happening to the United States. It’s a great country. But the United States is being taken advantage of by Japan and so many other countries. I mean it’s really a shame. I see what’s happening in terms of our leadership. I mean they are being outplayed and outsmarted by every country. It’s just one of those things.’

The year was 1988. Twenty-seven years later, America ‘being taken advantage of’ would be a central element of the Trump campaign. He would rage about America’s ‘terrible’ trade deals, suggesting that they had caused millions of jobs to be exported overseas. He would also target illegal immigrants, especially Mexicans. And of war hero and elder statesman John McCain, he would say: ‘He’s a war hero because he got captured? I like people that weren’t captured.’

And it worked. As my Republican guests acknowledged, Trump was already the ‘presumptive nominee’, with the withdrawal of the two last remaining competitors, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor of Ohio, John Kasich. On 26 May, Trump would nail down his nomination by securing his 1,238th delegate, and thus a definitive majority of the votes available, leaving the cream of the Republican Party scattered in his wake. Or as one of my guests put it: ‘What the … happened there?’

Having told London, back in February, that Trump would be the nominee, I had spent the intervening months, while reality caught up with prediction, trying to understand the secret of his appeal. I concluded that it was a combination of elements, some unique to the candidate, some reflecting the mood of America. But it started with Trump’s reality TV career. Notwithstanding its global success, not everyone, especially in the business community, was a fan of The Apprentice. But there is no doubt that the CEO, played by Lord (Alan) Sugar in the British version and Trump in the original American version, is a covetable role: a mythical, god-like figure Who Is Never Wrong. Trump fronted The Apprentice for a decade, right up until his run for the presidency. So in those early overstocked primary debates, with sixteen candidates on the stage, Trump would have been, for many TV viewers, the only recognisable face.

Then they liked what they heard. Trump was box office. He didn’t duck and weave; he didn’t hedge, or try to bridge both sides of an argument; he didn’t obey the rules of political correctness. He said what he thought, in strikingly clear and simple terms (one analyst assessed, in a much-quoted article, that Trump’s language would have been understandable to a fourth or fifth grader, 9–11 years old, while the other candidates were speaking at ninth grade level, 14–15 years old). And then there were his speeches. Measured by normal standards, they were shapeless, rambling and policy free; Trump would just stand at the podium and talk. But they were addictive, even at times electrifying. There was no knowing what he would say next.

It wasn’t, however, just about tone and unpredictability. Trump’s messages were resonating to a degree very few had anticipated. America in 2016 seemed in an uncertain mood, anxious about its future and its place in the world. There were still wounds and resentments from the 2008 financial crisis; ordinary people had lost their jobs, but no bankers had gone to jail, and within a year or two, the Wall Street bonuses were as unreal as ever. People were worried about globalisation and the flight of well-paid factory jobs overseas. They hated being told that they had to learn how to code because robots would take over all the blue-collar jobs. They resented the flow of illegal migrants across America’s borders. They couldn’t understand why successive US governments had got bogged down in ‘un-winnable’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They despised the culture of political correctness, which they perceived as being told what to think by the East and West Coast elites. Most of all, they saw themselves as ignored and abandoned by a self-serving Washington.

Donald Trump seemed to be addressing all these concerns. He presented himself as a self-made, successful businessman who could restore economic growth and create jobs. He was a climate change denier. He raged against international trade deals, claiming that they cost American jobs. He asked why American lives were being lost in the ‘sand, blood and death of the Middle East’ and promised to bring the boys home. As he was self-financing his campaign, he could claim to be an outsider, not beholden to corporate America, and not part of the Washington conspiracy. And in the eyes of many Republican voters, he was the only politician to ‘get it’ on illegal immigration. It was an intoxicating mix. In essence he promised a return to better, more secure times, when the factories and the coal mines were working, and when America won its wars. His slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ was really an appeal to sepia-tinged nostalgia: a promise to turn back the clock.

Although it would all go sour later, in these early days of the campaign Trump also used the media brilliantly. He might not have known much about foreign policy (actually, any form of policy); but the art of manipulation he did know. He had reputedly learnt his trade, as a New York man-about-town, in the bare-knuckle world of the New York tabloids. One story from that time was that he had once placed a quote on the front page of the New York Post, supposedly by the woman who became his second wife, Marla Maples, that he had given her ‘the best sex I’ve ever had’. And once campaigning, while other candidates would control their media appearances rigidly, he would appear anywhere, anytime: perfect for the 24-hour news channels trying to fill time and space. One of the leading morning news shows, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, would phone him what felt like daily for his latest thoughts. The news channels also loved his ‘what’s-he-going-to-say-next’ speeches; so much so that they preferred to show an empty podium, with Trump about to perform, to any other of the candidates actually speaking.

I tracked Trump’s march to the nomination from Washington, and sent my political team to schlep around the primary circuit. I used the time to exploit one of the privileges of being British ambassador in America’s capital: the opportunity to learn from some of the great figures of recent American history, and in particular to get their take on the election race. I focused particularly on Republicans: what did they make of this unconventional likely Republican nominee? I called on Donald Rumsfeld, a controversial figure during his time as Secretary for Defense in the George W. Bush administration. He could not have been more gracious or more entertaining. Having myself borrowed many times Rumsfeld’s famous delineation of the world into known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, I asked him where it came from. He explained instantly that he himself had borrowed it from a senior NASA scientist with whom he had worked back in the 1990s on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the US. As for Donald Trump, he seemed relaxed about the prospect of him being the nominee. I asked him whether he wasn’t worried about what this said about the national mood: had America ever felt more divided, or more angry? He said, gently: ‘When I was a young congressman in Washington in 1968, I woke up one morning to find the city on fire. This is nothing compared to those days.’ Intrigued, when I returned to the office I reminded myself of the 1968 events. After the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April that year, Washington was hit by six days of riots, damage to hundreds of buildings, and more than a thousand fires.

It wasn’t just Rumsfeld. I also consulted Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff during George H. Bush’s presidency, then Secretary of State during George W. Bush’s first term. Over lunch, we reminisced about the Blair/Bush days and about Colin’s exceptionally close relationship with the then British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw. I asked for his take on the Republican race: it turned out he wasn’t an admirer of candidate Trump (as he has since made clear publicly). And I called on the grand old man of the Republican Party, Senator John McCain, who recalled his many encounters with British politicians, back to Mrs Thatcher. He had a long-running feud with Trump, so it was no surprise to hear him express the hope that someone else, indeed almost anyone else, would get the Republican nomination. But I also sensed with McCain, as with Powell before him, an edginess. They hoped Trump wouldn’t be the nominee, but they were already sensing that he might be, and calculating the decisions that they would then face.

A few weeks later, I heard more of the same when I had a drink with Michael Bloomberg, zillionaire and Republican mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013 (though he would briefly run for the presidency in 2020 as a Democrat). He spoke judiciously but left me with the indelible impression that he was finding it impossible to stomach the rise of Donald Trump, a minor figure amongst the New York elite compared to himself. (New Yorkers would say that Bloomberg had given away more money than Donald Trump had ever made.)

And in a typically DC moment, I turned up at a Washington Post event at the George Town Club, sat down at a random table to eat, and introduced myself to the others at the table, to hear one of them say, ‘Hi, I’m Bob Woodward.’ When you unexpectedly meet such a celebrated figure, it is hard to sound cool. I recall saying something completely banal about how closely I had followed Watergate, and how much I admired what he had done then and since. He forgave me this, and invited me to lunch. We kept in touch over the next three years. He would write, in the form of Fear, the best, most authoritative book about the first phase of the Trump presidency. And when I resigned two years later, he sent me a personal note so precious I feel like framing it. That said … he doesn’t really look like Robert Redford.

Alongside this stroll through the pages of history, the political team and I were trying to build up our contacts with the Trump campaign. These took some tracking down, as Trump had assembled a collection of fringe figures and unknowns – largely because the big names had either hung back or gone with Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. Indeed, a counter movement of ‘Never Trumpers’ was already developing. Significant figures from previous Republican administrations were signing up to letters asserting that they would never work for a Trump presidency. But we made some progress, starting with Wilbur Ross. I first met Ross when he attended one of our regular commentators’ roundtables to discuss the election race. He had been out in the media supporting Trump, notwithstanding his past as a registered Democrat. It was hard to find anyone in Washington who would ‘speak for Donald’. So Ross found himself an isolated voice in the discussion. He didn’t seem to mind, and I was so intrigued that I invited him to a one-to-one lunch.

In preparation, I briefly scanned his life and times. He was a fascinating figure: a Wall Street multi-millionaire known as ‘The King of Bankruptcy’, the nickname reflecting a career in which, first for Rothschild & Co. investment bank and then for himself, he had acquired and restructured failed companies in industries such as steel, coal and textiles. This had earned him his critics; to this day there are financial journalists trying to chase him down with stories of corners being cut or disclosure rules being ignored. Yet I could not but be intrigued by someone who seemed repeatedly to have invested in disaster and come away ahead.

When we started to talk, I asked about his relationship with Trump. The connection turned out to be a bankruptcy. In the 1980s, Trump had gambled massively on casinos on the Atlantic City boardwalk. He ultimately acquired three, finally spending almost a billion dollars on what was at the time, with a typically Trumpian flourish, claimed to be the largest casino in the world, the Taj Mahal – all financed by junk bonds at 14 per cent interest. By 1991, he was haemorrhaging money and filed for bankruptcy. Ross was asked to represent the bondholders. Plan A was involuntary bankruptcy and the ousting of Trump. After negotiating with him, Ross persuaded the investors to keep Trump on – albeit with only a 50 per cent stake in the business, and after being required to sell his yacht, the unimaginatively named Trump Princess. I asked Ross why he had saved Trump. He told me that there had been two reasons. First, he had been impressed by how Trump had handled the negotiations. He could have come across as a broken man, but he had been calm, organised and on top of all the detail. And second, Ross had noticed Trump’s star appeal – the way people had crowded around his car and mobbed him in his casinos. So a condition of the bailout had been that Trump should personally be present in the casinos as much as possible.

I stayed in touch with Ross throughout the election season. I asked him at one point whether he would take a job in a Trump administration. People usually hedge when you ask them that sort of question: Ross said straightforwardly that he would. He duly became commerce secretary – in which capacity he several times went out of his way to help us. The Atlantic City casinos, however, fared less well; they went bankrupt again and have all closed. News reports suggest that the Taj Mahal has found a role as a home for feral cats.

We didn’t stop at Wilbur Ross. My deputy developed a good relationship with Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager. This was useful until, on 20 June, Trump fired him. Meanwhile, I got to know Jeff Sessions, a senior Trump adviser, a long-time senator for Alabama, and as courtly a Southern gentleman as you could meet. He was one of the first senior Republicans to come out for Trump, and hence, we reckoned, a likely pick for a Trump cabinet. We were right: he became attorney general, though he later fell out with the President and also got fired. And in common with a number of embassies in Washington, we became aware of a young man called George Papadopoulos, who was putting himself around town as a leading foreign policy adviser in the Trump team. Having spent a year at University College, London doing his masters, he was quite the Anglophile, and though I never met him, my team got to know him quite well. But although he was indeed a member of the campaign foreign policy advisory panel, he never really convinced: in that memorable Texan phrase, he was all hat, no cattle. So when he asked us to set up a number of meetings with British ministers before a visit to London, we instead put him in front of the desk officer in the Americas Department. As the history books will relate, Papadopoulos got up to a number of other things in London which ultimately landed him in prison. Maybe we should have filled his diary for him.

My political team also came across a British element to the Trump campaign. It was a small company called Cambridge Analytica. They described themselves as a political consulting firm specialising in data analysis, digital campaigning and strategic communications. They already had something of a track record in American politics, having been engaged on several campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections. In the 2016 presidential elections, they were initially carrying out data analysis for Ted Cruz’s campaign. But they ended their association with Cruz after the 20 February South Carolina primary – according to the Cruz camp, because they really weren’t delivering anything of value; according to some in the media, because their founder, the reclusive American billionaire Robert Mercer, switched from Cruz to Trump.

The Cambridge Analytica team were based in New York, alongside the Trump campaign, rather than in Washington. So our contacts were more on the telephone than in person. At the time, it was never entirely clear what precisely they did; they certainly weren’t the only pollsters inside the campaign (indeed, the story was that this particular candidate was so obsessed with polling data that if presented with figures suggesting he was doing badly, he would demand new data be found from a different source that told a better story). But the CEO, Alexander Nix, would come through Washington from time to time, have a coffee with one of the political team, and provide some snippets on campaign dynamics – who was up, who was down, who counted and who didn’t. They were useful, though second-order, insights.

That a British company, albeit American-owned, had managed to break into the extraordinarily competitive world of US political consultancy was quite a story; that they had been hired by the likely winners of the Republican race made them hot property. So there was growing media interest in Cambridge Analytica’s life history. Initially, in the British media, the tone was celebratory – a bunch of Brits outsmarting the American companies and grabbing the best job in town. I wondered idly whether they would be up for one of those prestigious business awards at the end of the year. But as is now exceedingly well documented, it all turned bad – though not until a year or so later. It was revealed that the company had used an unauthorised intermediary to acquire the personal data of 87 million Facebook users. They had then used this data for profiling and targeted campaign messages; they were eventually banned from using the Facebook platform for any future messaging or advertising. Channel 4 News produced a seriously damaging piece of investigative journalism on the company, from which it never recovered. Cambridge Analytica would file for insolvency on 1 May 2018 and would ultimately close down.

The enduring known unknown is, did they make a difference? Cambridge Analytica’s calling card was ‘micro-targeting of voters’. The technical term for it was ‘psychographics’ – which, it has to be said, conjures up instantly an image of mad-eyed scientists conducting brainwashing experiments. In layman’s language, it amounted to analysing data to predict the behaviour, interests and opinions held by specific groups of people and then serving them the messages to which they were most likely to respond: hence the value of data from 87 million Facebook users.

It is of course impossible to know for sure whether many, or any, of the almost 63 million people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 were influenced by messages on social media. The Trump campaign itself downplayed the company’s contribution, describing it as modest and suggesting that it was claiming credit for work done by others. A cynic might observe that, once the company got into trouble, they would say that, wouldn’t they. But more persuasively, the view amongst political scientists was and is one of deep scepticism about the effectiveness of micro-targeting. One prominent figure in the field, Eitan Hersh of Tufts University, said ‘Every claim about psychographics made by or about Cambridge Analytica is bullshit.’ And personally, I was with the sceptics. The claims of the digital crowd reminded me of a different era and the ludicrously inflated claims made in 1979 about the role in Margaret Thatcher’s victory of the Saatchi ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ posters. I think that voters were rather more influenced by the spectacle of James Callaghan’s government being plainly out of ideas and staggering from confidence vote to confidence vote. Success tends to have many fathers, while failure is an orphan; and none shout louder than political consultancies associated with the former, or run for cover faster if attached to the latter.

We weren’t, of course, only building relationships with the Republicans. There was a Democratic campaign too. It was clear Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee, though it was equally clear that there were serious doubts about her among Democratic Party insiders, and a manifest lack of love for her among large swathes of the American public. But the die was cast early; the party thought Bernie Sanders too far to the left to be electable, and Joe Biden wasn’t running. And the Democratic establishment circled the wagons around her.

We knew most of this entourage. Many had worked in the Obama administration. Some dated back to Bill Clinton’s two terms. Generations of British ambassadors and politicians had connected with them. Yet building links with the 2016 campaign was an unexpectedly frustrating experience. The Clintons were notorious for running two parallel sets of advisers. There was the official team: the chief of staff, the campaign manager, the pollster, the policy advisers. And then there was the circle of longstanding Clinton friends and confidants, with whom every shred of advice from the official team had to be checked and tested. So it was a divided and, one sensed, unhappy team, and far less accessible than anticipated. It was weirdly easier to talk to senior members of the Trump team.

From what I heard and saw, journalists were finding themselves similarly excluded. Trump was everywhere on the news channels; Clinton’s team built a wall around her. There were exceptions: Jake Sullivan, a friend from the Obama days and Clinton’s lead foreign policy adviser, stayed in close touch. Democratic Party royalty like Tom Donilon, one of Obama’s national security advisers, did the same. There were lots of well-connected Democrats around Washington who were happy to critique the Clinton campaign from a distance (though they would have expected jobs had she won). And the middle rankers in the campaign team were happy to escape for an evening to share their insights. But the senior figures – the inner campaign team – might as well have been working from Mars.

As we tracked the two campaigns, and kept London informed through our reporting, we also tried to bring out an unusual, perhaps unique, feature of this particular race. It was Democrat against Republican. But it was also Establishment against Insurgent. Trump was sometimes described, with good reason, as engaging in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He was at odds with some sacred tenets of the Republican faith, such as support for open markets and free trade. And he had assembled around him a team of outliers and unknowns: Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort, Kellyanne Conway, Peter Navarro, Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn. Some of this was by choice, but much was by necessity; the Republican mainstream was by and large refusing to work for him. It made for a wild ride, presenting a profound contrast between the style, tone and approach of the two campaigns, and the starkest of choices for the American people.

Meanwhile, I was putting a tricky question back to London. All of my predecessors, during US election campaigns, would have sought meetings with the two protagonists as they went head to head. But with one of these two candidates, there was the possibility, even the likelihood, that tweets or comments might be made after the meeting, perhaps in exaggerated terms – which might in turn cause problems with the other campaign team, or unwelcome stories in the media. So I reckoned I needed cover from London before making a move. I wrote to the Foreign Office setting out the arguments for and against; leaning towards doing it, but leaving the final call to them. And then I waited. And waited. I checked and was told that the issue was stuck somewhere in the senior levels of the system. Which is where it stayed.

Though this was frustrating, I didn’t really blame London, or agitate for a response. They were in the middle of a horribly close and intense referendum campaign. I guessed they were in a deeply risk-averse mood and really didn’t need this question. What they had done, in not replying, amounted to a soft no. I let it rest.

In amongst all this, the UK was acquiring a new Prime Minister. Theresa May was always the favourite to succeed David Cameron and was handed the role on 13 July by acclamation when her run-off opponent, Andrea Leadsom, pulled out in the wake of some tactless comments about the advantages of her being a mother, in contrast to the childless May. And May immediately appointed a new Foreign Secretary, former mayor of London and prominent Leave advocate Boris Johnson.

I met Boris Johnson in my days as Foreign Office press spokesman. He was at that time the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, already a well-known figure for his almost single-handed creation of the ‘Euromyth’: the supposed ambitions of the Brussels bureaucrats to ban prawn cocktail-flavoured crisps, or to harmonise condoms in a one-size-fits-all regulation. He in effect created a new genre of journalism, prompting other editors to demand similar stories from their journalists – and in the view of many, in both politics and the media, played a significant role in poisoning British public attitudes towards the European Union. Chris Patten, the former British EU Commissioner and Conservative Party elder statesman, said of Boris at the time, in an unwitting anticipation of a favourite line of a future American President, that he was ‘one of the greatest exponents of fake journalism’. Johnson himself once said: ‘I was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party.’ All that said, as a participant at briefing sessions, he was straightforward: with me, at least, he asked well-informed questions, listened to the answers, and unlike some of his colleagues, never became querulous if he wasn’t getting the story he wanted: his critics would no doubt say, recalling his firing from The Times for inventing quotes, that that was because he then just made it up.

Johnson’s appointment as Foreign Secretary prompted a lot of surprise. And he was instantly a marked man on the Continent, where, from what I was hearing from around the network, his early encounters with his European counterparts didn’t go well. The reaction to him in Washington was different; there he was welcomed and admired. He visited several times in his two years as Foreign Secretary (before resigning in protest at Theresa May’s handling of Brexit in July 2018). So I saw a lot of him, and the Americans simply liked him. They found him charismatic; they admired his erudition; they laughed at his jokes. One of his visits coincided with an annual reception I gave for the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington. Johnson agreed to speak, and then delivered, to a dazzled audience, a speech made up almost entirely of quotations from Shakespeare’s plays. On another occasion I was with him in Boston, where he was seeing US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose home town it was. That evening, we took him briefly to a reception with the local British-American Chamber of Commerce, where he enlivened his impromptu speech by waving a British teabag, lifted from his hotel room, in front of his audience: proof, he asserted, that Boston Tea Party notwithstanding, the British were still big in that town. As we later walked from the reception to a local crab restaurant, we heard, from the opposite pavement, in an unmistakably British accent, the cry: ‘Hey, Boris, you fucker!’ We all tensed: was the Foreign Secretary about to be assaulted? The answer was, on the contrary, that this group of Brits just wanted a selfie with him. Their opening gambit was, we explained to our bemused American secret service detail, a traditional British greeting of amity, employed once the evening was several drinks old. And Johnson of course did the selfie; several more votes notched up.

On a more conventional note, Johnson also delivered the Bentley. Jaguar have a deal with the Foreign Office to provide flag cars for ambassadorial vehicles in most of our biggest posts. The United States is Bentley’s biggest market; and when time was up for the Jaguar in which I was being transported around town, Bentley launched an audacious bid to undercut them for the replacement. It was the deal of the decade. They offered a car that would normally have cost at least three times as much as the Jaguar for a broadly equivalent price, threw in free servicing for its lifespan, and added the bonus that the embassy could keep whatever money we could get for it when it was sold on. I put this back to the Foreign Office for a decision. There were understandable worries that the car would be too showy and would be a bad story in the media. But both Alan Duncan, the minister of state, and the foreign secretary prioritised value for money for the taxpayer, as represented by the Bentley offer. So that’s what we got. When Johnson next visited Washington, he relived his time as motoring correspondent for GQ magazine, ‘testing’ it by driving it around the embassy compound at a healthy pace.

Johnson seemed fascinated by Donald Trump. When mayor of London, he had once said that a good reason for avoiding New York was the risk of rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with Trump. In most respects they were about as different as two people could be – in their attitude to issues like immigration, and especially in their relationship with the written word: Johnson a prolific writer, Trump famously averse to reading. But they shared a single-minded ruthlessness and political ambition. By the time Johnson became Foreign Secretary, Trump had secured the Republican nomination and was preparing for the Republican Convention and the run-off with Hillary Clinton. I think Johnson, while no supporter of most of the policies Trump was promoting, was intrigued by his success, and in particular by Trump’s use of language: the limited vocabulary, the simplicity of the messaging, the disdain for political correctness, the sometimes incendiary imagery, and the at best intermittent relationship with facts and the truth.

Back to American politics. Presidential nominating conventions date back to the early nineteenth century. Both the major parties hold them, with the formal purpose of selecting their nominees for the presidential election. For much of US history, conventions were murky, heated, even corrupt events at which factions quarrelled and backroom deals were done, sometimes producing unexpected results. Indeed, the term ‘dark horse’ first migrated from the horse racing track, where it was used to describe a horse unknown to the gambling community, into politics at the Democratic Party’s 1844 convention, where the almost unknown James K. Polk emerged as the nominee after delegates had split irretrievably over the front runners. Polk may have been unknown, but he went on to win the election and become the eleventh president. And the 1924 Democratic Convention needed to go through 103 successive votes to decide on a candidate, John W. Davis, who, unlike Polk, lost.

But these proceedings in smoke-filled rooms became increasingly unacceptable to the rank and file of both parties, culminating in the historically disastrous Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. The United States was deeply divided over the Vietnam war. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota ran against the war and energised tens of thousands of supporters. Vice President Hubert Humphrey didn’t compete in a single primary, but controlled enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. Angry McCarthy supporters joined forces with anti-war demonstrators and confronted the Chicago police outside the convention hall. Riots broke out, and the convention was conducted against a backdrop of tear gas grenades. The Democrats rightly concluded that this couldn’t be allowed to happen again. They adopted, on the recommendation of a commission headed by South Dakota senator George McGovern, a comprehensive primary system in which candidates would be allotted convention delegates based on their performance in the primaries. These delegates were then compelled to vote for ‘their’ candidates. The Republicans adopted a similar system in 1972.

Thanks to these changes, the conventions lost most of their drama. It was still theoretically possible that no candidate would arrive at the convention with an overall majority of delegates, necessitating a ‘brokered convention’ in which delegates could eventually be released from their commitments to vote in specified ways. But in practice, conventions morphed into coronations for the chosen candidates, with a succession of speakers lauding them on prime-time TV in front of, they hoped, tens of millions of viewers.

Whatever the lack of drama, I looked forward to my first and only experience of these unique events. The parties choose the locations carefully, in swing states, hoping to win extra votes by bringing thousands of delegates to key cities, filling the hotels and restaurants and boosting the local economies. The Republicans went first, from 18 to 21 July, in Cleveland, Ohio, in the heart of the Midwest. Hotel prices tend to quadruple during a convention, so my parsimonious political team reserved an Airbnb months in advance. Some British MEPs were attending, so we made a point of inviting them round for tea, to show how we were saving taxpayers money. The house was actually fine; and by chance, it was right next to the open-air venue of the biggest music event of the week – a concert by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Though ticketless, I was able to hear ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Free Bird’ with crystal clarity from the balcony of the house.

As for the main event, it was irredeemably strange. We were able to get onto the convention floor, in among all the banners. A succession of senior Republicans, tiny figures on a distant stage, were making speeches, but no one seemed to be paying attention. The speeches, in any case, tended towards repetition, with every peroration acclaiming ‘the next President of the United States – Donald J. Trump!’ All, that is, except Ted Cruz, who managed to get through his fifteen minutes without endorsing, or even mentioning, Trump. Cruz left the stage at a rare clip, to a few scattered boos. Otherwise, the crowd became energised only when Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned, at which point the whole hall broke into a chant of ‘Lock her up!’ This was commonplace at Trump speeches, as I had seen on television. But now was the first time I had experienced it in the flesh. I looked around me at the clenched fists and angry faces: it felt like genuine mass hatred.

The main event at conventions is, of course, the speech by the nominee: the showcase moment on prime-time TV. Trump’s speech, late on Thursday night, was dark and grim – and really, really long, finishing around midnight Eastern time. It contained a savage attack on Hillary Clinton – someone who ‘had committed terrible, terrible crimes’ – and it painted a picture of an America that was impoverished and crime-ridden, threatened by terrorism and with its soldiers ‘dying on distant battlefields’. For neutrals, listening to it in the hall while chants of ‘USA, USA!’ rang out, it was an uncomfortable and unsettling experience. Sharp-eared journalists, egged on by Trump’s team, highlighted its similarities to Richard Nixon’s address to the 1968 Republican Convention, delivered at a time when America was genuinely torn apart over Vietnam. In short, it felt excessive and unbalanced; belonging to a different universe from Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’. Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalypse masterpiece, The Road, with its marauding tribes of cannibals roaming a destroyed America, depicted a happier place.

There were two shafts of light in the darkness. The first was a meeting with Chris Christie. I had long wanted to meet the man who had for a while been the Great Hope, the Republican Party’s President-in-waiting. But he was damaged by a troubled second term in New Jersey, and his presidential bid never really left the launch pad. As an old friend of Trump, he declared for him when pulling out of the race. He then did a warm-up for a Trump speech in Florida, and remained on the stage, in camera shot, looking somewhat uncomfortable, while Trump did his piece. As one commentator gleefully noted, Christie looked like he was being held hostage. Social media went wild: ‘Free Chris Christie!’

I didn’t mention this when I saw him. Instead, we talked about his campaign run, his takedown of Marco Rubio and his friendship with Donald Trump. He was generous with his time, smart, insightful and exceptionally funny, not least because he is a gifted mimic. An hour went by in a flash. I saw him several times over the next two years; no meeting in my diary was ever more fun.

And then there was the party of the week. John Kasich, Governor of Ohio, should have been the host of a convention in his home state. But his personal relations with Trump were poor; and as a moderate Republican, I think he couldn’t bring himself to stand on the convention stage and endorse his rival. So he stayed away. Instead, he hosted a party at Cleveland’s main tourist attraction, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I went an hour early, toured the exhibits, talked to Kasich and attended the party. It was great, though inevitably it was impossible to agree with all of the names on the Hall of Fame inductees list: what were Aerosmith doing there?

While I was away at the convention, the embassy had a Harvey Weinstein moment. A senior embassy colleague received, out of the blue, a phone call. The voice at the other end announced that it was Harvey Weinstein, that he and a group of colleagues were about to set off by private jet from South Africa to London, and that one of their number lacked the necessary visa in his passport, but would want to accompany the rest of them to dinner in London. Could the embassy sort this out and ensure that visa requirements were waived?

The Home Office were consulted. They said, firmly, ‘No’: there were strict criteria for visa waivers and this individual didn’t qualify. The decision was immediately passed back to Weinstein. He exploded. Did we not realise who he was? Didn’t we know he had been a personal friend of successive British Prime Ministers? Did we not care that he had invested tens of millions in the British film industry? My colleague wearily promised to check again, further up the ladder. He did so. The answer was an even more emphatic no. He called Weinstein back to pass on the bad news. Weinstein told him that this would be a career-destroying call, that Weinstein would personally follow up with his friends in London, and that, after Washington, his next job would be the North Pole. My colleague found this disturbing: would Weinstein really go after him? When I got back, he asked me what I thought. I told him not to worry. I think that was a good call.

The Democratic Convention, a week later, was in Philadelphia. We again opted for an Airbnb, this time literally on the wrong side of the railway tracks. The house in which we stayed was modest but clean, but the vacant lot next door was a wilderness of broken bottles and used syringes. I took photographs to offer as evidence of my five-star lifestyle the next time the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee came to Washington. The convention itself was a much more controlled and choreographed affair; much less chanting, much more optimism. It also had better speakers: both Obamas (and Michelle was exceptional), Joe Biden, Bill Clinton. Michael Bloomberg, who ran New York as a Republican, took the stage and tore into Trump: ‘As a New Yorker, I know a con when I see one.’ And unlike the Republican version, it ran to time; the star speakers hit the prime-time TV slots. Even Hillary Clinton, no one’s idea of a sparkling public speaker, did well. The Democrats left feeling good about themselves, and confident about their prospects.

I got by with very little sleep; we all did. Outside the main hall, conventions are an endless rolling party. These are not drinking parties, since the beer tends towards the thin and weak, and the wine towards the undrinkable. Instead, they are festivals of gossip, intrigue and speculation. A keen observer of American politics can learn more in a night than in an average month. Looking back on the two conventions now, however, my overriding question is: what did they matter? Republican choreography was a shambles; Democratic organisation was immaculate. The Republicans portrayed America as a savage, feral place, beset by failure; the Democrats, by contrast, did their ‘hopey-changey stuff’ and were full of optimism. Michelle Obama provided the soundbite of the moment: ‘When they go low, we go high.’ And yet, a few months later, notwithstanding Philadelphia having hosted the Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton couldn’t even win Pennsylvania.

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