Nigel Farage has, it seems, struck up a rapport with President-elect Trump; an unlikely friendship as Trump doesn’t drink. Might Farage be a suitable UK ambassador to the United States?
The UK government thinks not and for the rest of us the question is likely to create a knee-jerk response. My k-j response was definitely not. The trouble with k-j responses is that they may be wrong. All the evidence is that Nigel is a buffoon better suited to spilling wine over himself with the people on Googlebox.
However, I have reflected and it could be, particularly with such a man as Trump, that Farage could build a relationship that would be hard for a more conventional diplomat or politician. These days the role of an ambassador is less important and he could be used to paper over the cracks in the special relationship occasionally and stay holed-up in the British embassy glad-handing all and sundry the rest of the time.
There is a precedent for such an appointment. Like Farage, David Ormsby-Gore was a politician. He sat in the House of Commons for eleven years and in 1961 was a Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in Harold Macmillan’s government. As was customary in those days, Macmillan consulted Kennedy on the choice of a British Ambassador in Washington. Apparently Kennedy said that he didn’t mind who was appointed, so long as it’s David Ormsby-Gore. His relationship with President Kennedy is summarised in Wikipedia:
Ormsby-Gore knew Kennedy well from his time in London, where his father Joseph P. Kennedy had served as American Ambassador. Like Macmillan, Ormsby-Gore was distantly related to Kennedy, but had a closer relationship than did Macmillan with the President-elect and his brother Robert. Six months after Kennedy took office Ormsby-Gore was in Washington, D.C. Referred to under the Kennedy administration as “our kind of Ambassador”, he supplied Kennedy with a stream of advice and Cuban cigars via his diplomatic bag. He was almost a resident at the White House, being more a friend of the family than a mere ambassador. After President Kennedy’s assassination there were rumours of a romance between Ormsby-Gore and Jacqueline Kennedy. These were not likely to have been believed by the family. Ormsby-Gore was one of the pallbearers at Robert Kennedy’s funeral along with Robert McNamara, John Glenn, W. Averell Harriman, C. Douglas Dillon, Kirk Lemoyne Billings (schoolmate of John F. Kennedy), Stephen Smith (husband to Jean Ann Kennedy), David Hackett, Jim Whittaker and John Seigenthaler Sr.. Under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration relations were more formal but remained excellent; and Ormsby-Gore maintained his position after the Labour government took power in Britain in 1964.
A fierce opponent of oil-barrel politics, Ormsby-Gore’s terse dismissal of the phenomenon ran: “It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.” The extent of his influence over the Kennedy administration is disputed. Unable to persuade the American government to agree with the British line over Yemen and the Congo, or to proceed with either a negotiated settlement with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev over Berlin or the Skybolt ballistic missile programme, he nevertheless played a significant role in the Cuban Missile Crisis and ensured that Britain’s views were taken into account by the American government.
However the friendship of Ormsby-Gore and Macmillan with John Kennedy helped secure the first Test-Ban Treaty in 1963. Macmillan and Ormsby-Gore had been attempting to achieve a test-ban treaty with the Russians for the past ten years, and won Kennedy over through letters from Macmillan and frank discussions between Ormsby-Gore and Kennedy. They convinced him to act like a statesman and conclude Test-ban treaties with Russia and not fear being branded as an appeaser by political opponents in the United States.
David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech, was married to my father’s first cousin, Sylvia – known in my family as Aunt Sylvie. She was killed in a car accident in London in 1967. He also died following a car crash in 1985.
