A few months ago David Lammy walked out of his front door with his wife and children and found that somebody had covered his car with graffiti. “It was quite disturbing, particularly for the children, to see something you own and drive in every day had been attacked by someone.”
The incident was initially all the more shocking because the words appeared to have been daubed in excrement and included the name of his wife, but police established that chocolate had been used and that other cars had been targeted, apparently by drunken youths. The inclusion of his wife’s name seemed to be just a coincidence.
Lammy was pleased with the police response on this occasion but the CCTV footage was not good enough to identify and apprehend anyone. This is the sort of supposedly low-level crime against property that the MP for Tottenham has in his sights. Last week he made headlines when he said that when dealing with shoplifting offences the impact on the victim should be taken into account. He argued that a £150 theft would have a greater impact on a corner shop than on Fortnum & Mason.
He was not, as some suggested, calling for softer sentences for those who target big stores. Indeed his wider point, he explains, is that property crime, which is three quarters of all crime, is very often ignored by the police and that “these are not victimless crimes.” It should not be acceptable for criminals to think they can get away with such offences, he says.
We are talking after a morning spent at the Metropolitan Police’s training college in Hendon where he offered himself as the target for a young woman police constable learning how to conduct a stop and search of a suspect. He didn’t make it easy for her, demanding to know why he was being stopped and telling her: “This is embarrassing. I’m the local MP!”
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He still has young men coming to his constituency surgery complaining about police treatment during searches and was pulled over by police while riding in a car during a previous election campaign. “It was a bit of a cliché. Two black men and my brother was driving a very flash car. It was scary because they had guns.”
Since the riots of 2011 that started in his Tottenham constituency, Lammy, who wanted to be a policeman as a boy, has immersed himself in police affairs. He applied to be a part-time special constable, but the Met commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, didn’t think it was appropriate to have a politician in the ranks and offered him instead a chance to experience all aspects of Met life.
It’s no coincidence that Lammy is campaigning to become the next mayor of London in 2016. Labour will hold a primary to select its candidate this summer, after the general election. With no well-known Tory candidate yet declared the Labour nominee will have a very good chance of filling Boris Johnson’s shoes.
Some in Westminster think that Lammy is too nice to become one of Britain’s most powerful politicians. And it is true that he calls all his mayoral rivals “friends” and is even generous to Johnson who he says “has been a good ambassador for London. He conveys the wit, humour, levity of our city remarkably well.”
In the polls he is currently in third place behind fellow mayoral hopefuls and London MPs Tessa Jowell and Sadiq Khan. How will he secure mass appeal? “I have travelled from a very tough background to a middle-class background. The nature of the economy and how it works for everyone is very important to me. I understand where it can all go wrong — I know that better than any other candidate.”
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Born to Guyanese immigrants, he saw his father disappear when he was young and he and his four siblings were raised by their much-loved mother in a terraced house on the periphery of the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, famous as the scene of the riots in 1985 which led to the death of PC Keith Blakelock.
A chorister in the church choir he won a place at the King’s School, a state school in Peterborough that provides the cathedral with choristers. He studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was the first black Briton to go to Harvard Law School and was called to the Bar. He became MP for Tottenham and the youngest MP, aged 27, in 2000. He was minister for innovation, universities and skills but didn’t make it into the cabinet.
The man who is seeking to be the most prominent black politician in Britain has met Barack Obama at an event for black Harvard alumni and they stayed in touch. Inevitably he was dubbed the “British Obama” and these days won’t say much about their relationship except that he remains “a huge supporter” and was “fortunate enough” to see the president at a White House prayer breakfast 18 months ago.
His wife, Nicola Green, an artist, with whom he has two sons, aged 9 and 7, and a newly adopted one-year-old daughter, is supportive of his bid for City Hall. His older son was reluctant because he feared he wouldn’t see his dad enough. Lammy promised to include him in the mayor’s entourage for the Rio Olympics if he wins.
With a big and competitive field of Labour hopefuls there is a genuine possibility that we might actually hear some bold and interesting views, such as Lammy’s take on property crime. “For most of human experience we have taken theft seriously — indeed its one of the Ten Commandments.” Thus speaks the politician who helps out at his church’s Sunday school.
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“If we are arriving at a place where the general perception is that this is an economic crime that you can claim on insurance, that we are no longer taking it seriously, well I don’t think there has been a public debate about that.” Where Johnson has cut the amount of money the Greater London Authority receives from council tax bills, Lammy would seek to increase it by £30 a household to better fund the police.
He has other ideas that are likely to ignite debate. He wants to see a rethink of the sacrosanct nature of the green belt to build homes on car parks, quarries and wasteland and would seek to redefine affordable housing because the term has become meaningless in London.
However, Lammy, 42, is most eloquent when talking about how, in a city of wealth disparity, we should deal with the challenges posed by the disaffected and potentially violent in our society.
“I have spent a lot of time in my life talking with young men and it doesn’t really matter whether it is young white men who can be seduced by an extreme EDL/BNP-type ethos, or young black men in urban environments where knife crime and misogyny creeps in, or young Muslim men seduced over the quiet spaces of the internet by an Islamic fundamentalism. This is a phenomenon of our age. It is accelerated by the worldwide web, it is complicated by modern life, the working hours people do and the absence of parenting.”
He thought hard about this after the riots. “I saw the consequences if people don’t have a stake in society. That stake is best displayed by a mortgage and a job. We should be very, very concerned by what some people describe as an underclass, but what I would call a workless class of people in society. That is a huge problem.”
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The prevention of the radicalisation of young men — and Muslim women, which he regards as “a deeply worrying phenomenon” — should be tackled by local communities in the same way as the scourge of knife crime. “Knife crime is solved in communities when churches, charities, schools, parents, ex-gang members, police, judges magistrates, everyone is on it . Relentlessly. I don’t see that radicalisation is any different.”
One approach he suggests is very simple: more sport. “I think of major public schools where they spend a lot of time investing in the fact that these young men should spend a lot of their days running off that energy. Why do we assume it is any different in any other environment? It is not.”
Lammy is not on the hand-wringing wing of the Labour party. “I am not terribly patient with flakiness. I am not a utopian, wet-behind-the ears liberal.” Young people need to work hard and take their chances. “Resilience is important and understanding that opportunities come to you and you need to take hold of them.”
He detects “a laissez-faire economic liberal environment, in which it is OK to make as much money as you want with no responsibility, coming together with a social liberal environment, in which you are very conscious of your rights but not of your responsibilities. Both those things can combine to create hyper individualism where everyone is just in it for themselves — whether it is the banker helping himself to a fat bonus or the MP helping himself to a duck house or a kid helping himself to that pair of trainers.”
Sometimes, “in the shrill Twitter world that we live in” he gets into trouble. “A school in south London banned slang from the class. I tweeted: what a great idea. I couldn’t believe the reaction on Twitter. Any school environment that thinks that language [slang] is cool is off its rocker. I wanted to be a barrister so spent weeks losing the street language that was not going to get me to that end goal.”
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During our Hendon visit he is pleased that officers are taught an approach to stop-and-search that is based on intelligence, not hunch or vague suspicion. They are also being trained to restrain troublemakers and take them to hospital rather than a police station at the first sign of health problems. This should prevent deaths in custody that trigger riots, but he spots a flaw in this approach. These days “you can’t guarantee that the ambulance service are going to be there so what does that do? I’m afraid it ups the stakes of something going very badly wrong.”
He doesn’t see Tottenham erupting again “because it was so hurt and then there was so much coming together and regeneration”, but it is not unthinkable elsewhere if there is a spark — such as a death in police custody. “I don’t want to see it again but I would be disingenuous if I didn’t explain to you the sorts of ingredients that can make these things happen.”
Lammy decided not to take a front bench job in opposition “because I wanted the freedom to speak my mind”. He is at odds with his party over the mansion tax and thinks that instead council tax bands should be widened and the cash raised used locally to build houses.
In 2013 he said that Ed Miliband needed to start looking like a prime minister in waiting. Does he now? “Yes. As we go into this election people have a sense of him and are faced with a serious choice.” But is that a choice between a left wing party and a right wing one, as Tony Blair recently suggested? Long pause. “I remain of the view that the centre ground of politics is important territory for the Labour Party to occupy.”
Would David Miliband have been a better bet? Lammy breaks into one of his high-pitched chuckles. “You are going to get me into . . . You are not going to get me to go there. Not six weeks before an election. Please stop!”