Special friends

SIR Kim Darroch, the now-former UK Ambassador to the US, was right to step down.

As soon as President Trump announced he wouldn’t be speaking to our man in Washington, there regrettably wasn’t anything he could realistically do. As he himself said, his job had become “impossible”.

But this whole episode has been utterly depressing, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

Perhaps Sir Kim was a little loose in his language, but no diplomat could ever expect his confidential notes to senior figures in London to end up on the front of the papers.

The tributes since his resignation certainly suggest that this was the first time he’d put a foot even slightly wrong in his entire career.

And the President — who is a friend of Britain — should have realised that when it comes to diplomacy, the shoot-from-the-hip style he uses on social media can have consequences.

No newspaper complains about a leak, but whoever undermined Sir Kim by releasing his not-quite-diplomatic cables should reflect on the damage it has done to not just our international standing but to the Foreign Office’s ability to do its job.

As for the Boris “row”, it’s unedifying to see his detractors weaponising this sorry saga against him.

Whatever he had said on the TV debate, Sir Kim’s position was already sadly untenable.

Moving forward, the Special Relationship must remain special.

Our links with America are stronger than one ambassador, from security to our shared culture.

But we must never be complacent about the ties to our closest ally.

Rotten Labour

YOU can see why Labour has turned on the journalists behind last night’s Panorama investigation into the party’s dreadful handling of anti-Semitism in its ranks.

The programme was damning from start to finish. It details the most extraordinary levels of racism in all corners of the party and a total refusal of the leadership to do anything about it.

Indeed the party appears to have actually tried to strangle worthwhile investigations at birth, and to have actively interfered in the disciplinary process.

Corbyn’s useful idiots have predictably turned on the whistleblowers – ironic, considering Labour’s

Shadow Chancellor once handed a petition to No10 calling for better protection for those brave enough to call their employers out for bad practice.

Hypocrites, the lot of them.

It may not be the case that Corbyn himself is a racist, but goodness, he does seem to attract an awful lot of them — and be too thick or ignorant to notice they’re there.

The party’s rotten, from top to bottom.

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