Madam amassador, Welcome to Italy!

The ambassador has arrived. "The Diplomat" is back – the Netflix series about a husband-and-wife team, both diplomats, who, whilst saving the West, bicker from morning till night just like any ordinary family grappling with shopping at a supermarket left empty due to protests or with their mischievous son.

She is Keri Russell, the former Soviet spy from "The Americans", who here plays Kate Wyler, the ambassador to London; He is Rufus Sewell, her husband Hal, a professional troublemaker; and in this latest, fourth, season, there are also, more so than before, Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, U.S. President Grace Penn and her First Gentleman, former colleagues in “The West Wing”.

Criticised for being unrealistic, with its plot twists and sudden deaths of presidents from heart attacks, "The Diplomat" nevertheless ends up being overtaken by reality, as is often the case (especially of late). Its creator, Debora Cahn, admits as much: these days, she says, whatever we write seems like a cartoon.

In fact, the story of Kimberly Guilfoyle has been making headlines in recent weeks. She is the US ambassador to Athens and has just been forced to resign because, according to the allegations, she asked a wealthy American man to settle her American Express bill (100,000 dollars) in exchange for access to the Trump administration (access which he claims he never obtained).

Guilfoyle had also been Trump’s quasi-daughter-in-law for a while, but this should come as no surprise, because many American heads of mission, whether male or female, particularly in the most sought-after capitals, are not career diplomats but rather major donors or figures close to the presidency, who are rewarded with a place of honour in countries with a temperate climate and embassies with high ceilings.

And perhaps the former emigrant even returns with full honours to the country from which his ancestors set sail on a boat (like Tilman Fertitta, the Sicilian-American owner of the Houston Rockets and ambassador to Rome, who ceaselessly cruises the Italian coastline on his ‘Boat 2.0’, the Boardwalk, which is 117 metres long and has a double helipad).

However, female ambassadors are in a league of their own, and the latest example is none other than Guilfoyle. Hers seems to be a classic case of ‘promoveatur ut amoveatur’. She was sent to Athens to remove her from Rome, much like Ranucci at Rai News. In Athens, however, they remembered her well: years earlier, on television, she had urged the Greeks to work harder, comparing them to a pet in need of training. Even her almost-father-in-law treated her a bit like a pet.

“She’s been a friend of mine for a long time,” said the president in March, introducing her at the White House during the Greek Independence Day celebrations, “I love calling her Kimber-lay, it’s my little pet name” (the affectionate nickname, the puppy name). According to the Wall Street Journal, she is reported to have said, with a twinkle in her eye, “You know, we can do this to any country we want, even here,” when commenting on the fall of the government in Bucharest. In a subsequent communication, she reportedly wrote, “Darling, please, I need you to do this for me today,” referring not to coups d’état but to a basic bank transfer, complete with a clasped-hands emoji and a PDF containing instructions on how to make the payment. This message was reportedly sent to Eric Deters, a former congressional candidate and Trump donor from Kentucky.

“If you make a bank transfer to American Express, it doesn’t show up anywhere,” she reportedly wrote, insisting. Deters, however, who claims to have already paid her $300,000 over the years, refuses to pay for fear that his wife will find out. Instead, he saves the chat history, and when relations between the two deteriorate, he takes the chats to the newspaper, which publishes the whole story on 7 October. She attempted to persuade the White House that the messages had been generated by artificial intelligence—version 2.0 of “my phone was hacked,” similar to the public prosecutor’s “Borgata dwarf” claim against Meloni. However, on 13 October, she was asked to resign, and she did so.

Two days later, our idol Paolo Zampolli – a Milanese, former modelling agent and the man who claims to have introduced Donald and Melania to one another, formerly ambassador to Dominica and subsequently ‘US special envoy for global partnerships’ – was also sidelined (after a year of furious emails with the Under-Secretary of State, who ordered him to confine himself to ‘cultural diplomacy’), in what seems like an episode of The Diplomat scripted by Neri Parenti or perhaps by an AI (on a basic subscription).

Guilfoyle now features on the roster of a speakers’ agency – those who give paid speeches: her speaking fee ranges from fifty to one hundred thousand dollars (perhaps to be paid directly onto her credit card). But her role as ambassador is merely the latest incarnation of this extraordinary character in the already crowded Trumpian menagerie.

She began as an ‘assistant district attorney’ in San Francisco (in short, a public prosecutor) and later became involved with Gavin Newsom, a handsome ‘old money’ figure who was elected the city’s mayor in 2004, and some commentators dubbed them ‘the new Kennedys’ (they separated the following year; today he is remarried, is Governor of California and is one of the potential candidates for the White House in 2028, if there is still a White House and free elections in 2028).

Meanwhile, she embarked on her second chapter: in 2006 she joined Fox, where, thanks to an afternoon talk show, she became one of the most recognisable faces on television. Then came the third chapter: Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, eight years her junior. They began dating in 2018, and at the end of 2024 he ended the relationship to be with influencer Bettina Anderson, whom he married in May of this year. So what do you do? Don’t you appoint your ‘golden girl’ public prosecutor as an ambassador to a European country? Perhaps not to a top-tier one. To console her, and perhaps to keep her quiet – heaven forbid she should write a memoir like so many public prosecutors do.

What harm can it do? Because ambassadors – both male and female – are often regarded as mere figureheads, like Ferrero Rocher chocolates. This is also the fear of the protagonist of "The Diplomat", Kate Wyler, who comes from war-torn countries, makes a point of never washing her hair as a mark of protest, and detests having tea with old countesses – in short, everything she believes her role as head of the diplomatic mission in London entails.

Instead, she will find herself embroiled in a series of scandals, murders, tragedies and dramatic twists. In real life, however, there have been several outstanding female ambassadors—or rather, “Madam Ambassadors”—who have made history, or at least made the news. Callista Gingrich, wife of the more famous Newt—the Republican politician whom she converted to Catholicism—left the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See in 2021. The diplomat, who now represents the United States in Switzerland, is known for her immaculate grooming—specifically her sleek, silver bob, which has drawn comparisons to a character from Mars Attacks!

However, even before her, Italy had long been a favoured posting for high-ranking ambassadors, both male and female. The first woman to hold the position was Clare Boothe Luce. She began her career as a playwright: her play "The Women" was adapted into a film in 1939 starring Norma Shearer. She later became a Republican MP and a fierce opponent of Roosevelt, who campaigned against her re-election by describing her as a sharp-tongued forty-year-old ‘glamour girl’. She is also credited with the aphorism ‘No good deed goes unpunished’: no good deed will go unpunished.

Since 1935, she has been the wife of Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life and Fortune, and in 1953, after campaigning for Eisenhower alongside her husband, she was rewarded with the post of ambassador to Italy. She disembarked in Naples from the Andrea Doria in April of that same year. She was the first woman to head the American mission to a major power, and is perhaps the one who most closely resembles the Netflix character ‘Diplomat’.

Far from being a cocktail-party ambassador, she worked tirelessly and clashed just as fiercely with the Italian government of the time. A fierce anti-communist, on 28 May 1953 in Milan, on the eve of the elections, she warned that if Italians were to fall victim to totalitarianism (whether from the right or the left, she said, though everyone understood she was referring to the Italian Communist Party), there would be “serious consequences” for cooperation with America. This was seen as interference, and the American press reported that she had caused the centre to lose votes.

Relations with the President of the Republic, Gronchi, remained rather frosty. Things also got off to a bad start with the Pope at the time, Pius XII: as she too had only recently converted, it is said that, after yet another tirade on the subject of faith, the Pope snapped: ‘I know, madam, I know: I’m a Catholic too’. Her term in office ended not with credit card problems but with medical tests. Not because of elevated transaminase levels from eating too many ‘suppli’ in Roman trattorias – as often happens to visiting Americans – but due to trace amounts of arsenic in her blood. It was said to be the paint flaking off the ceiling of her bedroom at Villa Taverna, the ambassador’s Roman residence in the Parioli district. This sparked a scandal and protests amongst Italian paint manufacturers. In 1956, he resigned for good.

Another ambassador with strong ties to Italy was Pamela Harriman. Although she headed the Paris office rather than the Rome one, she met a dramatic end there: on 4 February 1997, she suffered a brain haemorrhage whilst swimming in the pool at the Ritz.

The then President, Bill Clinton, sent Air Force One to collect the body. Because Pamela had not been an ambassador like the others. On the contrary: she was born Pamela Digby, from an ancient landed aristocratic family but without much money, and rather plain-looking at that. When the Second World War broke out, she received a phone call: it was Randolph Churchill, Winston’s eccentric son, who was due to leave for the front and, fearing he might not return, wanted to secure an heir for the dynasty; he’d made enquiries, and a friend had described a woman of noble birth who might do the trick. ‘What does she look like?’ asked Churchill Jr, still on the phone. “I’ve got red hair and I’m quite plump, but Mum says that childhood plumpness goes away.”

The wedding took place on 4 October 1939 in the presence of the highest-ranking aristocracy and, of course, Winston Churchill, who was not yet Prime Minister. Once she became pregnant, Pamela moved in with her in-laws. She then began a relationship with Averell Harriman, the fabulously wealthy son of the owner of Union Pacific and almost thirty years her senior, who was the US government’s chief envoy in London. Lord Beaverbrook, the publisher, appointed her as the Daily Express’s Paris correspondent.

At one point, she had a relationship with Aly Khan, an Ismaili prince and famously well-endowed (he was Karim Aga Khan’s father), and flew off with him to the Côte d’Azur. Khan, however, dumped her on the spot for Rita Hayworth. Meanwhile, on the Riviera, the most significant encounter for Italians occurs: Pamela meets the young bachelor Gianni Agnelli, who is not yet the sophisticated, multilingual playboy, collector and friend of the world’s powerful figures. He will become just that thanks to her.

The Agnelli family are far from pleased. The English ‘predator’ – divorced and, moreover, an Anglican – is hardly the ideal bride for the unofficial heir to the Italian throne. The relationship lasted five years and, according to the book "Capote’s Women" – not particularly remarkable but full of gossip – by Laurence Leamer, a journalist specialising in powerful women, she did everything she could to win him over, and taught him everything. “Gianni was used to going out with a string of hedonistic cocaine addicts whose main qualities were their physical appearance and their money. She brought together versatile and refined groups of high-society guests, and he appreciated her for that.” Connections, codes of conduct, access to high society on the international stage.

But apart from her sisters, Pamela was deeply disliked by Giorgio, her brother with well-known mental health issues, who had been erased from the family history, and who at one point fired a shot at her. Despite the gunfire, she carried on, and considered converting to Catholicism (yet another one!) to marry Gianni and seek an annulment of her marriage to Churchill’s son. However, she discovers she is pregnant. She terminates the pregnancy, then returns to the social circuit. The famous incident occurs one evening in August 1952, while dining at a villa on the Côte d’Azur: he leaves her there because he is bored. She returns home and finds him with another woman, Anne-Marie d’Estainville, prompting Pamela to fly into a rage. He offered to drive his casual lover home but, ‘high on cocaine’, as the book puts it, he took a bend too sharply and crashed head-on into a butcher’s lorry.

He suffered a broken jaw and a leg fractured in nine places. He was transferred to a hospital in Florence where doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but he refused: he would keep it, and would limp for the rest of his life (in elegant Tod’s ankle boots). His sisters are terrified that, whilst he’s in hospital, Gianni will get together with Pamela, and that’s when they play the Marella card – the delicate princess with the very long neck (though, as the book reveals, this was apparently a photo retouch by Avedon).

The rest is history. Pamela will finally marry Harriman, and from her Washington drawing room she will help the Democrats return to the White House. Clinton will reward her with Paris. They had said of her: ‘She isn’t witty’. “She’s much better than that: she makes you feel like the wittiest man in the world.” Meanwhile, Truman Capote, who had de jure included her amongst his ‘swans’, is said to have come up with the scathing quip: “If as many cocks came out of her body as have gone in, she’d look like a porcupine.”

Amidst blunders and porcupines (very few porcupines, mind you)—excuse the sexism and speciesism—Paris remains a highly coveted location: at the moment, it is overrun by yet another member of the Trump entourage, Charles Kushner, father of Jared, the son-in-law who is the ‘negotiator’ (sic) for Ukraine and the Middle East. It is unclear which of the two causes more trouble. The property developer father, a convicted criminal (in 2005 he pleaded guilty to tax evasion and served two years in prison), is, according to legend, the real reason why his son married Ivanka: to secure a pardon and public rehabilitation for him (the former came in 2020; the latter seems a truly daunting task). When mentioning him, Trump explained to Paris Match that it was a great thing “because he’s family”. He was summoned twice by the Foreign Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, but on both occasions he saw fit not to turn up. Nothing more has been heard of him since.

His son, however, is reported to have profited from his position even during his father-in-law’s first term in office. On Thursday, Vanity Fair published an extract from a book by journalist Matthew Cole, according to which Dutch military intelligence, exploiting a hacker attack, allegedly spied on the first son-in-law’s phone, observing him accessing an account in the Emirates; according to Cole, the Saudis and Emiratis had made at least 2 billion dollars available to him. Kushner has denied everything. At least he won’t have any credit limit issues.

In short, perhaps it is best to recall the good old days: the first American ambassador to Paris was Benjamin Franklin (1776–1785). He was a true celebrity; he negotiated with Louis XVI for the recognition of the independent United States and quickly realised the French were snobbish towards the uncouth Americans. Rather than complain about it, he decided to capitalise on it, going over the top with an outfit that has gone down in history: amidst the elegance and wigs of France, he would walk about wearing a woodcutter’s fur cap – now, of course, a thing of the past. His likeness appeared on medallions, rings, watches and snuff boxes, and fashionable ladies sported the ‘coiffure à la Franklin’, which imitated the cap worn in place of a wig. Today, however, we have a boorish president who sends his cronies around the world to serve as ambassadors: and he keeps the fur hat on his own head, oh well.