Last Updated: October 27, 2007 10:33:02
London, October 27: A former US diplomat has claimed President Bush had personally pushed for the sacking of Lord Malloch-Brown from the UN because he was "anti-American".
According to a new book written by John Bolton, Washington's former UN Ambassador, Bush had asked incoming UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to oust Lord Malloch-Brown from the post of UN Deputy Secretary-General, the highest UN post ever held by a Briton.
Malloch-Brown is now a junior foreign office minister, reports the Daily Mail.
The revelation seems to point to America's unhappiness with Lord Malloch-Brown, who caused a rumpus in July by declaring that Britain should distance itself from the United States.
According to Bolton, Bush met Ban informally on October 17 last year, told him to "get rid of the (senior) staff" and to appoint his own team when he took over at the start of 2007.
The American president reportedly specifically asked Ban to "get rid of Malloch-Brown", calling him "anti-American", Bolton reports.
Ban did not renew Lord Malloch-Brown's contract, and, within months, he was given a peerage and named foreign office minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations in Gordon Brown's first appointments as prime minister.
Bolton clashed repeatedly with Lord Malloch-Brown while serving as the US Ambassador at the UN headquarters - a job he says Lord Malloch-Brown lobbied to stop him getting.
"This petty bureaucrat obviously saw himself as floating above UN member governments, rather than recognising he was a mere international civil servant," Bolton writes.
Bolton, a Baltimore fireman's son who rose to become a leading voice of the Republican Right, and served as UN ambassador in 2005-2006, bristles at what he sees as the condescending attitude of British diplomats.
"Many Brits believed that their role in life was to play Athens to America's Rome, lending us the benefit of their superior suaveness, and smoothing off our regrettable colonial rough edges," Bolton writes.
"Jones-Parry (Britain's Permanent Representative at the UN) was obviously of that ilk," he says.
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