Remarks by the Republican nominee for vice-president have just made life more difficult for our Foreign Secretary, David Lammy.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio last week suggested that the first Islamist state to obtain nuclear weapons was not Iran or even Pakistan– it was the UK. The remarks elicited some laughter from his audience, as they were intended to. Let us not start fretting that the man likely to be just one heartbeat away from the Oval Office from January genuinely believes that Britain has been captured by extremists determined to impose Sharia Law on its citizens or strike with mighty vengeance those who dishonour the Prophet.
But it is a signal that Britain needs to start addressing the prospect of Trump 2.0. The task will be fraught and challenging. People of courage, principle and sensitivity will be required for the task.
Enter David Lammy.
Even before the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at the weekend, there were already big question marks over Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Lammy to one of the four great offices of state, in charge of Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world.
But events in the US have brought renewed focus on some historic Tweets that the Tottenham MP ill-advisedly published when he was in opposition. And they raise serious question marks over Lammy judgment and his ability to do the job he has been in for less than a fortnight.
Most concerning is Lammy’s decision, in 2019, to mock Trump for complaining about how he was being treated by his political opponents. “4 US presidents have been assassinated snowflake”, he said on Twitter. While Lammy might claim today that he would not have made the crass comment had he known that Trump would actually become the target of a gunman, he said himself that four presidents have been murdered in office: gun violence is part of American culture and British politicians really shouldn’t tempt fate publicly.
Under the last Labour government, Lammy was a supporter of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in their premierships, voting to renew Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent while he was collecting a salary as a minister.
Then, in opposition, he supported Jeremy Corbyn, a man whom Lammy knew well – certainly well enough to know that he was a unilateralist, a self-declared friend of Hamas Islamist terrorists and had been a consistent critic of the European Union for decades. In fact, with an In/Out referendum on Britain’s EU membership looming, Lammy chose to nominate Corbyn – the only anti-EU candidate in the field – to be leader of the Labour Party, despite Lammy’s claims before and since that he was a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of Remain.
A year later, Lammy announced that, his previous voting record notwithstanding, his Christian faith would now not allow him to vote for the renewal of Trident. And a few years after that, with Corbyn safely suspended from the party and Keir Starmer installed as party leader, he decided that retaining Trident was “paramount” after all.
In 2017, Lammy praised Corbyn’s leader’s speech at Labour conference as “bloody brilliant” (it wasn’t) and predicted that Corbyn “is heading to Number 10”. But by 2021, Lammy had changed tunes again, expressing regret that he’d nominated Corbyn and insisting that, contrary to what he himself had said publicly, he had never believed Corbyn would ever become prime minister.
Lammy’s historic remarks about President Trump are just another reminder of his poor judgment. Describing the leader of the free world as “a neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath” and a “tyrant in a toupée” will undoubtedly have achieved what Lammy wanted to do at the time – elicit praise from Labour activists and members – but they were not the remarks of a serious politician, let alone a statesman, and certainly not a future Foreign Secretary.
Lammy, perhaps rather optimistically, counts Senator Vance as a friend, having praised his autobiographical discourse on America’s working classes, “Hillbilly Elegy” while – inevitably – drawing parallels with his own upbringing in London.
But whether the two men’s “friendship” is confected or not, it will always take second place to Vance’s loyalty to Trump. It would be naïve in the extreme to suggest that relations between the next Trump administration and the Starmer government would not be even slightly handicapped by the fact that the Foreign Secretary has used such insultingly absurd language to describe the president. Or perhaps Lammy has judged that Trump is the kind of guy who never holds a grudge?
The triumph of the Trump/Vance ticket in November would present an existential crisis for Nato and for Ukraine, and would force the Foreign Office to do what it does best: use every millilitre of diplomatic nous it possesses to ensure that Britain’s interests do not suffer – or at least suffer as little as possible – in the new Trump era. Keir Starmer, knowing it was at least possible that the 45th president might become the 47th, appointed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office a man he knew had called Trump a neo-Nazi.
Judgment matters. We should be able to expect those who lead us to measure their words and their criticism, even at the risk of disappointing their audiences. Some things are more important than personal media profile. If the Foreign Secretary doesn’t realise that, Britain will pay the price
