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For the US Ambassador Jane Hartley, handling global crises and hosting President Biden are all in a day’s work. By Marie-Claire Chappet
A BUTLER BRINGS TEA AND SCONES INTO THE ornate green drawing room of Winfield House. The wallpaper is jade chinoiserie, the French windows look out onto a frostbitten Regent’s Park. Jane Hartley, the US Ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, sits on a dusty-pink chaise long ue (‘her favourite’ according to an aide, who swiftly moves me off it when I arrive) and laughs at how appropriate the culinary offering is. ‘When in Rome,’ she says with a shrug.
Little wonder that her current appointment is seen as the most coveted diplomatic position in American politics. She jokes that many of her colleagues told her she was taking an ‘easy’ job, after years working in Washington as a CEO of two major companies, and as the ambassador to France during the Charlie Hebdo, Nice and Bataclan terrorist attacks.
‘They said UK politics is always calm, but I’ve seen two monarchs, three prime ministers and I’ve lost count of how many chancellors, in just two years,’ says Ambassador Hartley with incredulity. She won’t be drawn on her preference of premiers in her first year, but one can perhaps discern it from her emphasis on the attributes she values. She recoils from those with too much ‘ego’. Twice she cites Sue Gray as an example of a ‘very impressive’ civil servant, loves John Major and Theresa May for putting ‘country and government first’ and pronounces both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak good choices because they are ‘civil and stable leaders’ who ‘won’t attack democracy completely’ – unlike the spectre of Donald Trump in the next US election, whom she credits with the destruction of American patriotism. ‘We had to rehabilitate it afterwards.’
Prime ministers, civil servants, members of the clerg y and defence; all seem to pique her curiosity. Many, it seems, have sat in my seat having afternoon tea. ‘The job’, she says, ‘is all about relationships.’ It explains why Winfield House is thriving under her stewardship. She has hosted fashion dinners with Tory Burch and a 20th-anniversary celebration for Frieze London, as well as a legendary Fourth of July soirée. Last autumn, Kamala Harris, in London for the AI Summit, landed via Chinook helicopter on the lawn.
Far from just being the glamorous châtelaine of Winfield House, Hartley is under a lot of pressure. Her days are spent preserving the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US, at a moment of global crisis. ‘That’s pretty much the only thing The Diplomat gets right,’ she says of the Netflix show many assume is based on
