Will you sleep more soundly with David Lammy as FOREIGN SECRETARY?
been introduced until 2003, when Lammy was aged 31.
After an awkward pause, he claimed to have confused tax credits with income support, adding: ‘I grew up in a very poor family, with five kids in Tottenham [North London].’
That much is certainly true. The son of Guyanese immigrants, whose alcoholic father left the family home when he was a small child, Lammy escaped poverty via what he once described as a ‘Billy Elliot moment’, winning a choral scholarship to a state boarding school in Peterborough. He then attended the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) before becoming the first black Briton to gain a place at Harvard Law School.
Lammy then enjoyed a few years as a barrister, along with spells at law firms in London and California, during which he earned enough to buy his first home, a three-bed house in Tottenham.
He still keeps it as a rental property, living with artist wife Nicola Green and their three children in a second, smarter, home in nearby Finsbury Park. His legal career was, however, cut short by politics. In 2000, aged just 27, he entered Parliament at a by- election following the death of Labour MP Bernie Grant.
While initially tipped for superstardom, drawing comparisons with Barack Obama, his performance in a series of junior ministerial posts was regarded as mildly disappointing, meaning he failed to gain promotion to the Cabinet during the Blair and Brown eras.
On a more frivolous note, Lammy also suffered a blow to his intellectual credibility in 2009 during an appearance on Celebrity Mastermind when he claimed, among other things, that the Nobel Prize winner for Physics in 1903 was Marie Antoinette having been given ‘Marie’ as a clue (it was Marie Curie), that the large prison in the middle of Paris was called ‘Versailles’ (The Bastille), and that Henry VII had succeeded Henry VIII.
Perhaps more worryingly, given his current job, Lammy also told the quizmaster that the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003, which took place in Georgia, had actually occurred in ‘Yugoslavia’, a country which effectively ceased to exist in 1992.
After Labour’s election defeat the following year, he was a candidate for the Shadow Cabinet, but failed to win enough votes from fellow MPs to be elected. There followed a decade on the back benches, where he supplemented his MP’s income via speaking engagements, an occupation he continues to this day.
Last Autumn, for example, he took three corporate engagements that involved talking about Black History Month, at £5,100 each.
He has also enjoyed a three-year stint hosting a weekly chat show on LBC, for a fee of almost £1,000 a time. To the annoyance of many colleagues, that has given him an extravagant entry in the Register of Interests of MPs.
‘For years, we’ve been wanting to attack the Tories with their fat- cat second jobs but they threw money-bags Lammy back in our faces every time,’ says one colleague.
Following his shock elevation to the Shadow Cabinet after Keir Starmer became leader, Lammy’s historic opposition to Britain’s role in NATO was also identified as a potential cause of embarrassment. For back in 2016, he made an impassioned Commons speech opposing nuclear weapons.
‘As a Christian . . . the idea of loving thy neighbour and protecting our world for future generations simply cannot hold if we have stockpiles of [nuclear] weapons,’ he said, adding: ‘I cannot with a clear conscience vote for what is effectively a blank cheque for nuclear weapons.’
He then denounced the Trident weapons as ‘completely useless as a deterrent’.
AMAZINGLY, Lammy’s Christian principles have now shifted significantly. Last year, he wrote a joint article for the Daily Telegraph with Labour’s defence spokesman Jon Healey claiming that he was ‘proud’ that nuclear safeguards were ‘our party’s heritage’ and alleging ‘my commitment to Nato and the UK’s nuclear deterrent is unshakeable’.
If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. And if you believe anything you may perhaps believe that David Lammy is ideally suited for one of the three great offices of state.
Only last week, he was looking forward to that prospect during a fawning interview with the largely anti-British and Left-leaning New York Times.
‘If I have the privilege of becoming foreign minister,’ he said, ‘I’m very conscious that I’ll be the first — it almost makes me emotional as I say it — the first Foreign Secretary who is the descendant of enslaved people.’
It would be a truly creditable achievement. Were it not for the existence of the former Tory Foreign Secretary James Cleverly whose mother happens to be from Sierra Leone, a country that was founded by freed slaves whose capital city is named Freetown as a result.
Any self-respecting expert on foreign affairs should really know this.
But — as Keir Starmer may soon find out, to his cost — David Lammy has never been one for getting his facts right.