VOGUE editor Anna Wintour would have been the US Ambassador to Britain had Hillary Clinton become President, according to Washington insiders.
So far advanced in planning was Clinton’s campaign, that as well as the important ambassador roles, they also had names for just about all of the positions an incoming president needs to fill.
Though it may reek a little of arrogance to have, in many ways, already measured the curtains in the West Wing before a single vote had been cast, it’s one of the biggest jobs a president faces, and reportedly the enormity of the task has taken Donald Trump’s team by surprise.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s transitional team hadn’t realised they would need to replace all of the staff serving the president.
Yesterday, new media company, Axios, formed by one of the founders of Politico, released the list of staff that Clinton insiders say would have served the administration of the first female president.
John Podesta, whose computer was hacked and emails leaked to WikiLeaks, was one of three names identified with the position of Secretary of State. Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden was also linked with that job.
The deputy Chief of Staff would have been taken by Huma Abedin, whose estranged husband Anthony Weiner indirectly helped to derail the campaign after exposing himself on the internet, which set of a chain of events that led to the director of the FBI claiming Clinton was being investigated in the closing stages of the election race.
But it is the inclusion of British-born Wintour as the next Ambassador of the United States to the Court of St James’s that has garnered most attention in the UK.
Wintour was born in London, and is one of the most influential and notorious journalists in the world.
Quick to temper, and often demanding, Wintour was the inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada, written by one of her former assistants.
Difficult to work with she may be, but she was also responsible to turning round the fortunes of Vogue, making it the most important voices in global fashion.
Wintour and Trump had clashed during the campaign, though managed to mend fences in recent weeks. Trump even tweeted that he considered Wintour a friend.
The two will meet again on Friday when the new President meets key journalists, including Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
Carter and Trump have been enemies since 1988 when the journalist called the businessman a “short-fingered vulgarian”.
“Dummy Graydon Carter doesn’t like me too much...great news. He is a real loser! @VanityFair,” Trump tweeted in 2012.
“If Graydon Carter’s very dumb bosses would fire him for his terrible circulation numbers at failing Vanity Fair-his bad food restaurants die,” he said around the same time.
Carter wrote in Vanity Fair in 2015 that he still receives letters from Trump debating the length of his fingers.
“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him – generally a tear sheet from a magazine,” he wrote in Vanity Fair’s October 2015 issue. “On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers.”
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