It takes real skill at this delicate moment in history to offend die-hard supporters of both Israel and Palestine. But then, the man who would be Britain’s next Foreign Secretary has a gift for upsetting people.
During a single 24-hour period a few days back, David Lammy also managed to fall out with the Biden White House, several of London‘s leading diplomats and a senior colleague in Labour‘s ministerial ranks, who dubbed him a ‘loose cannon’.
The reverse charm offensive, from a politician bidding to become our diplomat-in-chief, could hardly have come at a worse time for His Majesty’s Opposition.
We are, after all, at the start of a General Election campaign that is likely to hinge on questions of competence and readiness for Government.
Little wonder that former Labour MP Tom Harris, who served as a junior minister alongside Lammy in the Noughties, responded to his burst of ‘diplomacy’ by declaring him ‘entirely unfit to hold one of the great offices of state’ in an article headlined: ‘Starmer is running out of time to rid Labour of David Lammy.’
It’s not as if Sir Keir hasn’t been warned, either.
For in the more recent years of his two decades in politics, the MP for Tottenham has been responsible for more gaffes, U-turns, and petty fights on social media than almost any other Parliamentarian.
They are not, to put things mildly, character traits that make for an effective leader of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Yet we may now be just half a dozen weeks from the 51-year-old controversialist becoming the standard-bearer of Global Britain.
How will that go? The events of this week offer a somewhat chilling insight.
First, Lammy chose to wade into a heated diplomatic row by appearing to endorse a bid to prosecute Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged ‘war crimes‘.
The Labour frontbencher declared that ‘international law must be upheld’ after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court called for an arrest warrant to be issued.
David Lammy (right) pictured with Ed Miliband (left) and Sir Keir Starmer (centre). In the more recent years of his two decades in politics, the MP for Tottenham has been responsible for more gaffes, U-turns, and petty fights on social media than almost any other Parliamentarian, write Guy Adams and Andrew Pierce
That placed him entirely at odds with the policy that Britain’s diplomatic establishment has been delicately pursuing for months. It also caused huge consternation in Washington, where President Joe Biden, the leader of our greatest strategic ally, dubbed the ICC’s move ‘outrageous’.
On the political front, it also drew unwelcome attention to Labour’s remarkably close links to many members of Doughty Street Chambers, a ‘co-operative of radical Left-wing barristers’ as the Times Literary Supplement recently put it, which Sir Keir Starmer helped found and where Lammy was recently appointed ‘associate tenant’.
The chambers saw three of its lawyers instructed to sit on the ICC panel (of six) that recommended issuing the arrest warrant. One was Baroness Helena Kennedy, a Labour Peer, another Amal ‘wife of George’ Clooney.
We digress. The day after this kerfuffle, Lammy was once more at the centre of controversy, after he delivered a speech at Chatham House declaring that Labour will recognise Palestine as a state, if the Party achieves power.
Similar recent moves by the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain have prompted Israel to withdraw its ambassadors, on the grounds that it will not pursue friendly relations with countries that want to reward Hamas for ‘the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust’.
Will a Starmer election victory kick off with Foreign Secretary Lammy sparking a similar diplomatic crisis in the UK? One that causes a deep rift with not only Israel but also the USA?
That’s what one senior British diplomat now fears.
‘Biden’s White House took a very dim view of Lammy’s remarks,’ he told the Mail this week.’
These things are noticed. The remarks will be viewed with even more alarm if he was in fact testing the water on Palestine for the Labour leadership.’
Ironically, Lammy is also facing incoming from the anti-Israel lobby, whose protesters decided to picket a speech he gave at the Institute for Public Policy Research this week.
Hecklers disrupted proceedings for ten minutes, accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000 from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.
The fact that both sides in the Gaza debate have been upset by the shadow foreign secretary is not lost on senior Labour colleagues. They have been advocating a policy of sidestepping the issue of Gaza for now, so as not to alienate either Muslim voters or supporters in the Jewish community.
‘Lammy’s timing could not be worse,’ said the senior ministerial colleague. ‘On the eve of the General Election, he decides to wade, feet first as usual, into the Palestine controversy while war is raging in Gaza,’ said the source.
‘The last thing we want is to draw attention to the splits in our ranks on a ceasefire. But Lammy has always tended to speak before he thinks.’
That much is certainly true. Especially on social media, where his habit of making enemies could soon cause severe damage to Britain’s ability to make friends and influence people.
Take, for example, the question of how a Starmer administration would get on with the White House in the event — now more than 50 per cent likely, according to bookmakers — that Donald Trump becomes President in six months.
Back in 2017, Lammy launched a series of extraordinarily hostile attacks on him, using Twitter to declare: ‘If Trump comes to the UK I will be out protesting on the streets. He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser.’
He then wrote a piece for Time magazine that alleged: ‘Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is a profound threat to the international order.’
These are not, to put it mildly, remarks that a future Foreign Secretary ought to have in his back catalogue. But Lammy has a longstanding habit of suggesting that people he disagrees with are racists who are inspired by Hitler.
Following the Brexit referendum, he suggested that members of the Tory Party’s Leave-supporting European Research Group were similar to Nazis, prompting the broadcaster Andrew Marr to challenge him and say that comparing voting to leave the EU to murdering six million jews ‘was an unacceptable comparison, wasn’t it?’
Lammy responded: ‘I would say that wasn’t strong enough.’
Supporters of Youth Demand and Stop Polluting Politics hold up a banner at a speech made by Lammy on May 21. Lammy chose to wade into a heated diplomatic row by appearing to endorse a bid to prosecute Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged ‘war crimes’
In 2019, meanwhile, he launched into an unprompted attack on Comic Relief for having the temerity to send celebrity journalist Stacey Dooley to Uganda.
‘The world does not need any more white saviours,’ Lammy wrote on Twitter. ‘As I’ve said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes.’
Dooley replied: ‘David, is the issue with me being white? (Genuine question) . . . because if that’s the case, you could always go over there and try raise awareness?’
Lammy is, of course, entitled to a personal view about the rights and wrongs of Comic Relief.
But these remarks do not sit easily with his potential role in charge of the Government Department responsible for delivering overseas aid.
Another broadcasting institution he’s levelled an allegation of racism at is the BBC.
This one was utterly unhinged. It took place during the 2013 papal conclave, when the Catholic Church’s cardinals met to choose a new Pope, and a BBC news item picturing the temporary chimney erected over the Sistine Chapel carried the caption: ‘Will smoke be black or white?’
It was a reference to the fact that the colour of smoke has, for centuries, been used by the Vatican to show whether a new Pontiff has been selected (white for yes; black for no). Lammy, who appeared blissfully unaware of this fact, took umbrage by declaring on social media: ‘This tweet from the BBC is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope?’
When users attempted to correct him, Lammy then doubled down: ‘It’s the juxtaposition of black and white. But maybe I’m just weary of the endless discussion of race.’
It wasn’t until an hour later that he realised that he’d made a schoolboy error: ‘Sorry folks . . . my mistake. . . I got it badly wrong!’
Other times he ‘got it badly wrong’ on Twitter included an occasion in 2022 when he scoffed at the idea that Boris Johnson shouldn’t resign as Britain’s Prime Minister because the war in Ukraine had recently broken out.
‘Churchill replaced Chamberlain just days before the Second World War, Lloyd George replaced Asquith weeks into the Somme, Eden lost his job during the Suez crisis,’ he wrote. All three of those so-called historical facts were, in fact, incorrect.
Then there was the occasion in 2015 when he tweeted about the Tory Party’s austerity-era efforts to reform the welfare system. ‘When I was growing up, my mum relied on tax credits,’ Lammy wrote. ‘Tonight in opposing the Welfare Bill, I voted for millions of people who do the same.’
Eagle-eyed readers promptly responded that tax credits hadn’t 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 super-stardom, 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 claming 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.