Led by pygmies

Watching UK foreign secretary David Lammy address the UN Security Council this week had a surreal quality to it. There he was – the man who once said in a now-infamous appearance on Celebrity Mastermind that Georgia’s Rose Revolution took place in Yugoslavia, that Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for her work on radiation and that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII – being introduced as ‘his excellency’, before castigating Russia and Vladimir Putin’s ‘mafia state’.

Sure, general knowledge isn’t the same as geopolitical nous (though knowing something about the world probably helps). Nor was there much to disagree with in his condemnation of Russia’s barbarous, imperialistic designs on Ukraine – even if it was little more than a series of well-worn platitudes; ending with the obligatory ‘Slava Ukraini’, performed for the benefit of the TV cameras. Still, what the infamously gaffe-prone Lammy has shown during his short time as foreign secretary so far is that what he lacks in pub-quiz prowess he also lacks in political substance. And plain old competence.

Last night, fresh from his latest diplomatic blunder, when he penned a Substack blog suggesting that Azerbaijan had ‘liberated’ the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Lammy was dining in New York City with Keir Starmer and one Donald Trump – a man he once described as a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’. Having spent so much of his career gripped by whatever liberal-elite hysteria happened to be fashionable, Lammy is now having to pretend that he is a serious person.

Still, he’s not making a terribly good fist of it. ‘I stand here also as a black man’, a visibly seated Lammy thundered at the UN, seemingly unaware he was at the Security Council, flanked by representatives from Sierra Leone and Mozambique, rather than at some ‘pale, male and stale’ private members’ club, where his jibe might have actually stung. Paying tribute to his enslaved ancestors, who rose up courageously against their tormentors, Lammy suggested the experience of his long-dead forebears means he personally knows imperialism when he sees it. This felt less like an inspired rhetorical flourish and more like changing the subject. Back to David Lammy.

Of course, it’s not just Lammy, is it? This new government seems to be filled with people who look like they landed in the position they’re in by a series of hilarious misunderstandings, and are now left to style it out as best they can. Just take Keir Starmer. Have we ever had a prime minister as hollow as him? A man with no consistent political convictions to speak of, beyond liking the idea of being prime minister. A man who spent several, tortuous years trying to work out whether or not women can have penises, and if so what precise percentage of women fall into that category. A man who is personally disturbed by portraits of Margaret Thatcher. A man who, just weeks into his premiership, is deeply unpopular and stands credibly accused of outsourcing decision-making either to chancellor Rachel Reeves or the omnipresent Sue Gray.

Then there’s Ed Miliband. That this man is our Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero is a bad joke. That we even have a Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero (thank you, Conservative Party) is a bad joke, given you can have energy security or Net Zero, but you certainly can’t have both. Government figures released this week revealed that British companies are paying the highest electricity prices of anywhere in the developed world. And in Miliband we have an eco-zealot keen to double down on all the policies that got us to this point – who genuinely thinks we can ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by 2030 and wants us to shun our own fossil-fuel reserves at a time of sky-high energy bills and global instability.

Miliband is more culpable than most for the green immiseration of the UK. He was one of the custodians of the 2008 Climate Change Act, which committed the British government to punishing, legally binding decarbonisation targets for the first time. It mandated swingeing CO2-emissions cuts of 80 per cent, despite there being no pain-free way to get there. And it established the unelected, ‘expert’ Climate Change Committee to preside over UK climate policy, over the heads of the public. The Tories, who were both just as given to the environmentalist orthodoxy and ever-desperate to appeal to people who will never vote for them, took this demented agenda to its logical conclusion, mandating Net Zero emissions by 2050.

It’s not just that our leaders are personally unimpressive, piss-weak, lacking in any authority – although all that is very true. They are also clinging to failed elite ideologies – extreme environmentalism chief among them – even as their disastrous consequences pile up all around us. Lammy has attempted to articulate his own vision for UK foreign policy. His doctrine, which he dubs ‘progressive realism’, was laid out in a 4,000-word essay before the election. As it turns out, it’s neither progressive nor realist. It appears to be little more than an exercise in branding and triangulation: an attempt to take the ‘ethical’ foreign policy of Blair and turn it into something less war-mongering and more conscious of the limits of Britain’s power on the world stage. Even so, Lammy seems more preoccupied with climate change than the wars currently raging across the globe. In a recent speech, he argued climate change was a much bigger threat than the likes of Putin or Hamas. He might as well have told the slain of eastern Ukraine or southern Israel that at least they got out while the going was good.

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about Peter Turchin’s concept of ‘elite overproduction’, and the tendency of contemporary Western societies, funnelling ever-more kids through higher education, to produce more would-be members of the ruling class than can possibly be absorbed into the ruling class. But for me, the more pressing failing seems to be quality control. Just look at the supposed, would-be rulers we are (over)producing. Even those who make it to the top are bereft not just of intellectual seriousness, but of basic common sense, too. Starmer, Lammy, Miliband? We could pick three ordinary people at random and they would do an infinitely superior job. If these three clowns are truly the best the British establishment can produce, it has surely forfeited its right to rule entirely.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater