Outed

Much bleating in today's Guardian about how awful it is that Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador to the United States of America has seen fit to resign.

Which seem to me to be bleating up the wrong tree. An ambassador cannot possibly continue to have a sensible relationship with a government which he has slagged off in private, after those slaggings off have been made public. It may not be his fault, but he does have to go.

At a personal level, he is a man of a certain age who will have accumulated a very decent defined benefit pension and we do not need to worry that he will be short of the odd bottle of Margaux.

At a professional level, we might wonder why he saw fit to confide thoughts of this sort to what proved to be an insecure medium. Don't we have diplomatic pouches and fancy codes (see Le Carré) for this sort of thing? Has he been as careless of such matters as Mrs. Clinton?

Furthermore, the leak happened on his watch.

PS 1: it would be interesting to know how the Daily Mail - or whichever paper it was - sees that the public interest has been served by publication of this material. In the good old days, the package of compromising material would have been handed into the nearest police station, unopened.

PS 2: it seems that Château Margaux is now owned by a Greek, one André Mentzelopoulos. Another chunk of Greek money which ended up out of range of the Greek tax authorities? But checking, Wikipedia tells me that this is not the case. Rather an expatriate who made a lot of money out of arms deals involving France and Pakistan. See references 1 and 2.

Reference 1: https://www.chateau-margaux.com/.

Reference 2: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Mentzelopoulos.