I first met David Lammy during what I would call his “Twitter years”, which he prefers to think of as act two of his political career. Act one had been his junior ministerial years, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. A dashing young barrister, friend of Barack Obama and graduate of Harvard Law School, Lammy was elected in 2000 at just 27. Within two years he was promoted by Tony Blair, had a celebrity girlfriend — the TV presenter June Sarpong — and appeared to personify New Labour.
During his decade on the back benches following Labour’s defeat the Tottenham MP became Twitter’s noisiest social justice warrior, ranting away about everything from the London riots and Grenfell fire to Comic Relief, Brexit and Donald Trump. In party leadership contests he nominated Diane Abbot then Jeremy Corbyn, and in the Commons he denounced Trident as “completely useless as a deterrent”. When I interviewed him in 2018, during a particularly gruesome spike in London youth knife crime, he swore a lot, shouted his head off and cried.
Act three, which he calls “grown up, wanting to effect real change”, began when we met again in early 2020. Newly appointed to vice-chairman of Keir Starmer’s leadership campaign, he had just written a thoughtful book about, among other things, the Brexit-voting Middle England people of Peterborough. He seemed much calmer, more reflective and deeply preoccupied with the imperative for Labour to win back those voters. And now here we are, three weeks out from polling day, in Peterborough Cathedral.
The son of Guyanese Windrush immigrants spent his first decade in “suffocating” inner-city chaos and stress in Tottenham, fearful of his alcoholic father’s rages at home, and of “Thatcher’s police” on the streets. His mother worked shifts as an assistant at Camden Tube station; his father had been a taxidermist but hit the bottle when his business failed. A gifted church singer, at ten Lammy won a local authority scholarship to board at King’s, a CofE state school in Peterborough. Only 80 miles away, it might as well have been on the moon.
“Coming here was a bit like being Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, falling into a different world. I didn’t realise this existed.” The only black face in a dorm of 15 boys who all knew what a butter knife was, Lammy was bullied and teased and bewildered. His parents divorced a year later, his father disappeared to America and Lammy never saw him again; he died a drunken pauper in Texas.
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Lammy owes his career to the King’s School. “If I hadn’t come here I wouldn’t have become a politician. I might never even have got out of Tottenham.” The discipline of choral practice and high academic standards opened his eyes to ambition. Boarding culture came as a shock, though: he had to learn how to hold a fork correctly, the housemaster administered corporal punishment with a slipper and his impoverished, broken family was an agonising embarrassment. But in this cathedral, where Lammy sang every day from 11 to 18, the schoolboy found “stillness and serenity”. To this day he still prays — and not just in church. “Oh no, I pray in times of stress.” Has he prayed during this election campaign? He laughs. “No, I haven’t.”
To save time I tell him not to bother qualifying my questions’ working assumption, that he’ll be our next foreign secretary, with “if should we be so humbly privileged to win” flannel. Already he looks at ease with the two-man close protection security detail assigned to him since the campaign began. As we marvel at the cathedral’s ecclesiastical splendour, he jokes, “Limestone must be addictive to me. This place, Harvard, Lincoln’s Inn, Westminster — clearly, I’m addicted.” Leading me through the nave to the choristers’ pews, he seems as at home as if in his living room.
When we relocate to a threadbare office unit and a plate of custard creams in the campaign HQ of Andrew Pakes, the local Labour candidate, he retains the air of a man ready for ambassadorial grandeur. He still has his booming laugh: shooing a bodyguard out of the room, he hoots, “I don’t think Decca’s going to kill me!” But Lammy is so statesmanlike by now I can barely get him to score points from Rishi Sunak’s D-Day vanishing act on June 6, when the PM skipped the afternoon ceremonies in France to attend a TV interview. I’m the one who has to bring it up.
At first he tries to deflect my questions with a reverie on the momentousness of the occasion, but I want to know what he thought when he first heard that the prime minister would be bunking off early. He hesitates. “Well, the French informed us.” In the sense of bland bureaucratic communication? Or “You’re not actually going to believe this, but your PM says he won’t bother sticking around”? After another uncomfortable pause, “Probably the latter.” Lammy didn’t actually believe it. “To be honest, I thought it was probably a mistake that had got lost in translation by the French. I thought, he must be there.” It wasn’t until world leaders filed along the red carpet to shake the French president’s hand that Lammy realised Sunak had been “subbed by Grant Shapps”.
Grant Shapps? I thought David Cameron had deputised for the prime minister. “Grant Shapps was the lead British state representative there. He shook Macron’s hand. And it was noted because all the other world leaders and monarchs were there.”
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In all of the furore over D-Day, the widely misreported misapprehension that Sunak’s official stand-in had been Cameron was never corrected by Downing Street. When I call the Ministry of Defence and ask them to confirm it was in fact Shapps, they tell me this is a question for Conservative Party Central HQ — which is patently incorrect, as it concerns official government business. I ask the Foreign Office, who promise someone will call me back, but no one does. Eventually the MoD calls back and admits that it is true.
What did Lammy think? “I just thought that was extraordinary.” Was he embarrassed? The silence this time stretches for seven seconds before, very softly, “I think we were diminished as a country for him not being there.”
I ask if he detected a racist dog whistle in Nigel Farage’s interpretation of Sunak’s misjudgment — “He doesn’t really care about our history, he doesn’t really care about our culture.” Without hesitation, “Yes.” Then what is Lammy’s explanation?
“In my experience of Rishi Sunak, when it comes to the ‘together’, he’s not very good at it. He didn’t go to the UN general assembly in September last year. He went to COP for about five hours. He’s a repeat offender when it comes to his attitude to international affairs. People say he’s a technocrat, much more comfortable with the bean counting.”
Lammy’s personal attacks have not always been so temperate. In 2017 he tweeted that Trump was “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser”, and wrote in Time magazine: “The president’s threats to Nato and the UN are no more logical than arson … Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is a profound threat to the international order.” The shadow foreign secretary’s tweets these days are so anodyne, I wonder who writes them. His gale of laughter confirms it isn’t him. Does he regret tweeting so much on the back benches? He stops laughing to think. “Probably, yes.”
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Trump is famously — vengefully — unforgiving, so Lammy had his work cut out on a recent charm offensive to woo Republicans in Washington, but he surprised everyone by delighting the Maga faithful. “I get America First,” he declared, and lavished praise on Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir by JD Vance, a Trump loyalist Ohio senator and vice-presidential hopeful. He also said of Trump, who notoriously threatened to let Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato allies failing to pay their full dues: “I do not believe he is arguing that the US should abandon Europe.” Lammy said in May that Trump, “in his own unique way, I think, is concerned about burden-sharing across Europe … and it is the right concern. It is still the case that there are European countries not spending as much as they should on defence.”
Does this mean Lammy was wrong about Trump — or thinks he has changed? His reply is smoothly well rehearsed. “I think you would be hard-pressed to find any politician in that era, in any democracy, left and right, who did not have strong views about Donald Trump.” So his view has changed? “I was on the back bench at that period, free to say what I felt. We’ve now moved into, I think, a slightly different place. The bottom line is, I take very seriously the responsibility I have if I become foreign secretary. What he was saying was, you guys in Nato have got to spend some more. And he’s right about that. So I’m prepared to say where he’s right.”
To quote Thatcher, is Trump a man with whom he can do business? “Yes.”
The fanatical Remainer sounds equally sanguine about our relationship today with Europe. “I recognise that there are some people in my party who want free movement back. They want us to rejoin the European Union tomorrow. But Keir Starmer is absolutely right to focus his attention on those who lost out with free movement.” He flatly rules out rejoining the single market, for the “principal reason that people in Peterborough, people that I’ve known all of my life” didn’t want it.
“And I meet those people on doorsteps all over the country. And those people, who voted for Boris, some of them are switching back to us. And we have to keep faith with those people. And they have to keep faith with us.” He can’t name a single benefit of Brexit, but won’t even say if he privately hopes we will one day rejoin the EU, offering instead, “I don’t think it’s going to happen in my political lifetime.”
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Is net immigration still too high? He shifts uncomfortably. “People’s starting point is, they want order. Lots of the doors you knock on, the answer is yes.” If I knocked on his door, what would he say? He says lots of constituents in Tottenham, including immigrants, say it is. That sounds, I suggest, like a yes. Reluctantly, uneasily, “Yes. That’s what I said. Broadly, yeah.”
He worries about the rise of the far right across Europe. Young people ask him “Will there be a Third World War?” His Damascene conversion to staunch support for a nuclear deterrent he called “useless” only eight years ago smacks of electoral expedience, so I ask what changed his mind.
“To be clear, I’ve never been a unilateralist. And it is not unusual for people with Christian faith to express doubts about weapons. The truth is, as I sit here today, as shadow foreign secretary, Vladimir Putin has taken his troops into Ukraine, and I am privy to information that tells me pretty definitely we need the nuclear deterrent.” By now his tone is chillingly sombre. “That’s why, in this job, I have been crystal clear about the need for a nuclear deterrent, and for a leader, which Keir Starmer is, prepared to use it if that day comes. And I stand by that.”
Ukraine doesn’t stand a chance without US support, so I’m puzzled by his confidence that Trump, if re-elected, will provide it. Lammy shares some wisdom from Trump’s former secretary of state. “What Mike Pompeo said to me yesterday is, in the end, forget the noise, forget the tweets, forget the rhetoric. Donald Trump doesn’t like losing. If Donald Trump becomes president we’re not going to lose this war.”
The current foreign secretary, I remind him, went to Mar-a-Lago to court Trump’s support for more military aid and got sent packing by Republicans incensed at his audacity to “lecture” them. “Kiss my ass,” one sneered. Unperturbed, Lammy thinks Cameron “just got the tone wrong”. His strategy will be to make the case for America’s self-interest, and will, he predicts, be more successful.
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“We had very cordial relations,” Lammy says of his opposite number. “There are lots of areas of foreign policy that aren’t bipartisan, they’re about the national interest, and it’s very convivial. We’re also grown-ups and we’re able to disagree. I get along with people. I’m seeing him in a couple of weeks’ time and we’re constantly on WhatsApp.”
By contrast, he didn’t speak to his friend Diane Abbott once during the ugly ding-dong over her reselection in Hackney. “I don’t think that was great,” he murmurs gnomically when I bring up the row, but he is “glad” she is standing for Labour. I thought he might have tried to talk Jeremy Corbyn out of standing against Labour in his former constituency. “No, I haven’t spoken to Jeremy for some time. We haven’t sort of sat down and had a chat for a good couple of years.” Out canvassing later that afternoon, we knock on the door of a man who says he used to vote Labour but switched to the Tories a few years ago. “Because of Corbyn?” Lammy asks. The man nods. Lammy screws up his face. “Well, he’s gone.”
What would he say, I ask, to a left-wing undergraduate so disgusted by Labour’s support for Israel’s conflict in Gaza that they’ll vote for Corbyn, or literally any pro-Palestine candidate, to punish him. The reply is so boringly legalistic that I’m beginning to zone out when all of a sudden he swells up and starts shouting.
“So what is the difference between us? I think the difference between us is that some of those people called for a ceasefire on October 8. Some of those people were calling for a ceasefire at the end of October. Our view was we were not going to see a ceasefire at that point. We should call for a pause. And guess what? We got that pause that we called for.” The measured, self-contained statesman has flared into a tub-thumping firebrand.
“We’ve all been calling for a ceasefire as we sit here today, months later. The UN now has called for a ceasefire. And we haven’t got it. But the truth of this is it’s not enough to call for one — it’s the hard diplomacy to get it. And that is in the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government and Hamas. That is the truth.” The decibel level rises again as he leans forward. “So what is between us, is what I would say to that individual. What is really between us?”
He settles down into his seat again, the thunderstorm subsides and the statesman is back.
Lammy is one of the few high-profile politicians I’ve seldom heard anyone say they hate. What I do hear people say is that he bends every time a new political wind blows and is Westminster’s ultimate shapeshifter. Tatler recently ranked Lammy and his wife, Nicola Green, second on its Social Power Index 2023, describing him as a “prince of political invention.” To his Tottenham constituents he is a crusader against white privilege; to appeal to the kind of people who read the Daily Mail he has called Margaret Thatcher “a visionary”.
Having nominated Corbyn for leader in 2015, in 2021 he publicly apologised for backing him. Throughout Corbyn’s leadership Lammy referred to him as a friend but never served in his shadow cabinet and voted against him in Labour’s 2016 no-confidence motion. When Lammy joined a protest against antisemitism in the party he was threatened with deselection. Right up until Corbyn lost the 2019 election Lammy predicted that he would become PM, but declined to say whether he thought he would make a good one. How can the public trust a politician who keeps reinventing his own politics?
He sighs. “I’ve been in politics for 24 years. That’s long enough to have seen the different tides and trends. When I arrived in politics people said it was the end of history, that political consensus and globalisation were here to stay. The crash of 2008 moved us into a very different political period, where it was clear that there were big losers in that race to globalisation. And if anyone’s bothered to look at my own personal story or read my books, they can see that I am someone who finds the common ground with other individuals.”
His private life is equally multifaceted. Head boy in his final year at Peterborough, he studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, joined the bar at Lincoln’s Inn, took a master’s at Harvard and practised in California before returning to Tottenham to run for parliament, where he stood against Suella Braverman’s mother. In 2003 he and June Sarpong split, and two years later he married a white middle-class portrait artist, Nicola Green, with whom he had two sons, now 18 and 16, and adopted a daughter, now 10.
With his traditional Caribbean upbringing, Lammy thought their kids should be smacked, but Green was having none of it. Their children attend local state schools and love drill music, but come home to London’s literati in their kitchen. Conflicting class and cultural norms in his own house may help explain why Lammy’s political elasticity may look to him less inconsistent, let alone contradictory, than it does to the Westminster establishment.
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former foreign policy adviser, said of Lammy’s recent Washington visit, “I think he believes that through force of personality he could develop relationships in that circle.” He has indeed forged improbable friendships with JD Vance and with Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser on Trump’s election campaign, and when we visit his alma mater he chats easily with pupils, jokes with teachers and takes everyone by surprise when the choir finishes its performance.
“Could you sing the last verse again? And this might be ambitious, but would you mind if I joined in?” I think he’s about to sing, but instead he takes his place beside the conductor and co-conducts with unbridled vigour, his entire body moving with the music. The piece is called We Can Make a Difference. “Can we make it our new campaign song?” he asks. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” the music teacher deadpans.
In the car afterwards, sandwiched between his security detail, I ask if he thinks Ben Rhodes is right about the diplomatic power of his personality.
“Well, you know, as foreign secretary you’re the country’s first diplomat. I’ve presented a phone-in show on LBC for the past five years — and quite a lot of people are a bit dismissive of LBC — but it has made me a better politician, because I worked out that I rather enjoy listening to people. And foreign affairs at this level is in part about going to the United Arab Emirates, to Brazil, to France, and listening. It’s about really taking in what people are telling you about their countries, their problems, what you can do together. It’s not just about talking, preaching, or indeed lecturing. Sometimes that’s required, but the job is relational and I’m pretty good at that.”
Just one little thing belies the impression of sublimely relaxed self-assurance. Every time he sits down and crosses his legs, I notice his raised foot twists and twitches constantly — usually a telltale sign of nerves and stress.
In late 2022 Lammy was the guest speaker at an elite private media club dinner at Claridge’s. Still reeling from the calamitous Liz Truss premiership, this audience of power players could not have been more receptive to a senior opposition frontbencher. Lammy was his usual charming self, but my heart sank when he began with a shtick along the lines of “wow, a little black kid from Tottenham standing here today, who’d have thunk it?” Now about to become one of the most powerful people in the world, has he consciously thought about how to own his power?
“No.” He looks slightly annoyed. “No, I haven’t sat reflecting about the statecraft of my particular positioning in relation to power. My own experience is that people bring all sorts of prejudices to their judgments about me. And, to be honest, I’ve been underestimated all of my life. That is the truth of being me. No one thought I would leave Tottenham. No one thought I would succeed at the school I went to. No one thought I could get into Harvard. No one thought I would be a successful MP. And many people did not think I would still be here today. At every single stage I have been underestimated. But I am content with who I am. And I’ve got quite strong survival instincts. Hence, I’m still here.”
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