On Desert Island Discs, Matthew Barzun reveals the difficulties of explaining American gun laws, his Prince night with Barack Obama and his thoughts on Donald Trump

For most young Britons the United States is now synonymous with guns. This is the sad conclusion drawn by Matthew Barzun, the American ambassador to the UK, after visits to 142 sixth-form colleges.

The music-loving, high-profile diplomat will be giving up his job here after a three-year stint, when President Barack Obama leaves office in January.

But before leaving he has also visited BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs for a farewell taste of another British cultural tradition.

Clutching a kite-surfing kit, as his one luxury, and a copy of a philosophical work by his French grandfather, Jacques Barzun, the ambassador tells the presenter, Kirsty Young, that he is keen to try to explain American gun policy to bewildered British schoolchildren, who also regularly ask him about police brutality, racism, the healthcare system and Donald Trump’s popularity.

“I find it hard to explain our nation’s idea of freedom,” he says. “How we won our freedom from this country with guns. And that, until a group of people decide to make this [gun control] their issue number one, two and three, we will remain stuck.” After the Orlando shootings the ambassador recounts how he joined a 20,000-strong vigil outside the Admiral Duncan, a Soho pub popular with the London gay community and the target of a nail bomb attack in 1999. “I just felt I wanted to be there,” he said.

On a more positive note, Barzun, tells Young that British sixth-formers also associate America with the words “opportunity”, “freedom”, “tech”, “Nasa” and “Obama”.

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When he heard Obama speak at the Democratic party convention in Boston in 2004, he says, he found tears streaming down his cheeks. On Obama’s campaign team later, Barzun went on to boost the presidential candidate’s funds by inventing the “low dollar” method of fundraising, reaching out to lower-earning supporters.

He chooses the Prince track Delirious from the album 1999 to take with him to the fictional radio island because he listened to the album with Obama in London the evening after Prince’s death.

When Young asks what sort of president Trump would be, Barzun said he is usually careful not to be drawn into criticism because of his ostensibly apolitical diplomatic post. He broke this rule, however, he said, when Trump suggested that Muslims should be banned from the United States.

The ambassador, who has regularly hosted live music events at the United States embassy, chooses tracks by Belle and Sebastian, Johnny Cash and Emmylou Harris to keep him company.

He also defends Obama from the suggestion that he warned that Britain would lose some of its “favoured nation” status if it left the European Union. “There was nothing punitive about what he said,” Barzun said. “Friends should be honest and he wanted to say that there was no chance of jumping the queue.”