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New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Phil Goff was sacked after he made a critical comment about United States President Donald Trump during a public event in London Tuesday night.
Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen was a guest at London’s Chatham House, where Goff asked her a question quoting Churchill’s 1938 speech to the House of Commons after the Munich Agreement. In that speech, Churchill told Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that he had chosen dishonor over war.
“President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office. But do you think he really understands history?” Goff asked Valtonen during the live-streamed event.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters told the media on Thursday that it was “deeply regrettable” that he had to take action over Goff’s comments and that he would have done so if they had been made about any other leader.
Goff’s comments were “deeply disappointing” and made the envoy’s position “untenable,” Peters said.
“When you’re in that position, you represent the government and the policies of the day — you’re not able to free-think; you are the face of New Zealand,” he added.
Goff, a former leader of New Zealand’s Labour Party and former foreign minister, was appointed as high commissioner in 2022.
The case echoes the affair surrounding Kim Darroch, who resigned from his role as U.K. ambassador to the U.S. in 2019 after a series of confidential emails emerged in which the ambassador described the then Trump administration as “clumsy and inept.”
