Ambassador Kim Darroch, the UK’s Ambassador to Washington, has had his reports to the Foreign Office leaked to the press, causing a diplomatic row between the UK and the USA and eventually his resignation.

All diplomats are supposed to write unadulterated truths home to their headquarters about the politics, life, scandals and personalities in the country they are accredited to. It is their job to do so. Ambassador Darroch is an excellent ambassador and a very experienced one with a long successful stint in Brussels. Indeed, his time in Brussels preceded the fateful Brexit referendum.

The present situation in the US is becoming a very serious affair, not because of the leak but because the statements made by Darroch speak the truth about the crazy person ruining the world from the White House. 

Surrounded by a number of dangerous persons like John Bolton and Peter Navarro, and now the Attorney General William Barr, Trump is dysfunctional, narcissistic and dangerously dictatorial. He is Nero-like in his aspirations to become an emperor and start a dynastic rule of the world’s most powerful country.

Hitler, Napoleon or Stalin will look like small fry if he is allowed to continue placing the world’s peace and its economy at risk.

That Darroch’s comments are right is the common truth that all other ambassadors in Washington have been reporting to Rome, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels, Ottawa, Canberra and hopefully Valletta too.

Our ambassadors should be sending their opinions to Valletta from all the countries in which Malta has embassies, sending the naked truth about the regimes where they are sent to represent us. Even the Maltese ambassador to Azerbaijan should be reporting to Valletta about why this country chose to defend Malta at the Council of Europe last month. I would love to see some of the Maltese ambassadorial reports under this present government leaked. They would make great reading.

In our time, we were trainedto send in honest, unredacted reports of conversations, comments and opinions about our country, as well as similar opinions held about the leadership of the country or organisations we were accredited to. We would do so no matter how damaging to ourselves the reports may be or how much these would anger our politicians at home. The truth sometimes hurts!

In Trump’s case, the truth sent out by a close ally will hurt some Americans, but it is nevertheless the truth. The whole world knows it, and so do most Americans.

In Malta, I wonder what has been written by ambassadors accredited to Malta watching the farcical reporting of the flop by our “almost famous” Prime Minister. 

I wonder what has been written by ambassadors accredited to Malta watching the farcical reporting of the flop by our ‘almost famous’ Prime Minister

What our own ambassadors abroad send home about this will be just adoration of this attempt, seeing it as a victory instead of the utter failure of the hopeless, megalomaniac dream that it was. 

Not one prime minister or president among the 27 other member states would even dream of putting forward the name of a Prime Minister under whose regime an investigative journalist – a woman, mother and brilliant person – was brutally murdered in a car bomb inside an EU country without any consequence or independent inquiry being carried out. 

Nor would they countenance a Prime Minister who stands by a minister and his Chief of Staff opening secret accounts in Panama and trusts in other tax avoidance countries known in the police circles for bribery, corruption and money laundering, and so on.

And yet, the Maltese main TV channel blasted out fake news from Brussels that fooled many gullible Maltese.

This reminds me of a story about a rather powerful politician in an island of a European country who once went to his local village tailor with a bale of fine cloth bought in London, asking the tailor to sew him a three-piece suit.

The tailor took the measurements and, after a day or so, called the politician to tell him that the bale of cloth would only suffice for a pair of trousers and not a whole suit.

The politician then went to the capital city of his island and asked another tailor to sew him a three-piece suit. The tailor responded that the cloth would only suffice for a pair of trousers and a waistcoat but not a three-piece suit. 

The politician went to the mainland country’s capital and asked a tailor there. The answer, this time, was that only a pair of trousers and a jacket could be sewn, but there was not enough for a waistcoat. No three-piece suit there either.

After that, the politician went to the next country between his own and Brussels and, in the capital city there, he went to a famous tailor. This tailor said that he could stretch the cloth to manage a tight-fitting three-piece suit, but not the best-styled one. It would stretch across the growing belly.

So, finally, the politician went to Brussels where the tailor there was so pleased to meet him that, upon seeing the amount of cloth, he immediately told him that he could produce two three piece suits with stuff left over for a reserve pair of trousers in case he spills wine on the other pair during an official dinner.

When the politician, surprised by the news, explained to the tailor what the others had told him, the tailor replied with some words of wisdom. Politicians, he said, are always seen to be larger than they really are in their village, in their country and in the neighbouring country, but are seen at their true size everywhere else.

John Vassallo is a former Ambassador of Malta to the EU.