Auckland says Phil Goff’s position was made ‘untenable’ by his remarks at an event in London this week.
New Zealand has sacked its most senior diplomat in the UK for appearing to criticise US President Donald Trump during a talk in London this week.
Phil Goff, New Zealand’s high commissioner to the UK, lost his job over a question he asked Finland’s Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen during an event organised by the international affairs think tank Chatham House.
Valtonen’s speech was on Finland’s border with Russia and European security more broadly, in the wake of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In the questions that followed her talk, Goff said he had recently re-read a 1938 speech in which the British politician Winston Churchill rebuked the then UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain over his signing of the Munich Agreement, which allowed Adolf Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia.
Churchill correctly told the House of Commons that Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler would do nothing to prevent war in Europe.
Goff went on to ask Valtonen whether she thought the new US president was fully aware of such history.
“President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office. But do you think he really understands history,” Goff asked Valtonen.
The Finnish foreign minister replied by saying that Churchill had made some “very timeless remarks”.
Goff and Valtonen’s exchange came as world leaders continued to grapple with Trump’s position on the war between Russia and Ukraine. Critics have accused the new US administration, which wants to end the conflict, of favouring Russia, the aggressor, instead of Ukraine.
New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters said Goff’s “disappointing” comments had made his position “untenable”.
“When you are in that position you represent the government and the policies of the day,” Peters said. “You’re not able to free-think, you are the face of New Zealand.”
Goff and officials at the country’s London mission would “work through” the upcoming transition of leadership, he added.
Helen Clark, an ex-prime minister of New Zealand, took to X to express her concern about Goff’s dismissal.
“This looks like a very thin excuse for sacking a highly respected former NZ foreign minister from his post as high commissioner to the UK,” she said, noting that similar historical parallels were made at last month’s Munich Security Conference.
Goff, who is a former mayor of Auckland, became high commissioner to the UK in January 2023. He was appointed under the previous Jacinda Ardern government.
