A County Durham born national security expert has shone a light on the inner workings of Donald Trump’s White House.
Fiona Hill, a security advisor to Presidents Bush and Obama before serving Trump, grew up in Bishop Auckland before earning degrees at St Andrew's and Harvard universities and embarking on a high-flying career in the US as an expert in Russian and European affairs.
Dr Hill has revealed how Trump dismissed her almost from day one as "a middle aged woman with a funny accent".
Read more: Fiona Hill and her journey from coal house to White House
The coal miner's daughter told of her "irritation" at seeing Trump interrupt and patronise former Prime Minister Theresa May on his visits to the UK.
She told Sky News: "When people say you advised Trump, I didn't advise him on anything. In fact, very few people did because he didn't really listen to advice and he just wasn't particularly interested.
"He had a kind of a vision of who should be an advisor anyway and it certainly wasn't a middle aged woman with a funny accent. So right from the very beginning, it was basically, who are you? What could you possibly know about any of this?"
Asked about Mrs May's interactions with Trump, Dr Hill said: "This is a bizarre thing to say, but she would have been better off if she spoke a language other than English.
"To use Putin as an example, he had to listen to him because it had to be translated. With Theresa May he immediately could just interrupt her.
"That was kind of his style, and also if your voice was of a higher register as Theresa May's was, he would immediately see that as a kind of sign of weakness."
Dr Hill, who is an expert on Russia, also shared her thoughts on the ongoing war in Ukraine.
Asked if President Putin could end up using nuclear weapons in the conflict, she said: "I honestly don't know, but I think he's thinking about how he could use it.
"In a way he's already used it because he's talking about it. We saw what he did in Chernobyl, in terms of sending the military through the Chernobyl exclusion zone, he's already in that space."
