Trump-deranged David Lammy is a liability for Britain

David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary, is notoriously gaffe-prone. Who could forget his car-crash appearance on Celebrity Mastermind, when he answered that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, and that Marie Antoinette won a Nobel Prize for her research on radiation? Or when he appeared on BBC News claiming he hadn’t seen any policemen in his local area, while an officer decked in bright hi-vis stood on duty in the background of the shot. These may have been harmless, trivial gaffes, but some of Lammy’s old foot-in-mouth moments now risk causing a serious diplomatic incident. For the current UK foreign secretary once had a few choice words to say about the new president-elect of the United States.

Back in 2017, during Donald Trump’s first term as US president, preparations were being made for a state visit to the UK. When Lammy, then just the MP for Tottenham, got wind of the news, he announced on Twitter that he would be ‘out on the streets’ to protest against Trump – a man he considered to be a ‘racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser’. He even threatened to chain himself to the gates of Downing Street in order to disrupt Trump’s visit.

Incredibly, instead of stepping away from the keyboard, Lammy doubled down. A year later, Trump’s visit now looming, he wrote an article for Time magazine claiming that: ‘Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.’ One didn’t need to be a fan of Donald Trump to realise that this image of him, as a borderline fascist and threat to world peace, was absurd on the face of it.

Since becoming foreign secretary, Lammy has been forced to eat his words and beat a humiliating retreat. He and prime minister Keir Starmer met with Trump before the US election to try to smooth things over. Still, since Trump’s win this week, Lammy has been relentlessly confronted with his past remarks. New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch even quoted them during her first Prime Minister’s Questions this week, causing the Labour benches to squirm.

Of course, when he was just an MP, Lammy was under no obligation to be diplomatic. He had every right to criticise the US president, his policies or his character. The problem is, Lammy wasn’t merely critical of Trump. He was deranged about Trump. As Badenoch put it in the House of Commons, this was ‘student politics’ – an infantile temper tantrum unbecoming of any grown adult, let alone an actual member of parliament.

What made this shrill Trump-bashing even more curious is that Lammy used to be a much more thoughtful politician – especially in his contributions to Britain’s conversations on race. There was a time when he wouldn’t smear his opponents with baseless accusations of fascism. There was even a time when he would pointedly refuse to do the fashionable thing of blaming every problem facing ethnic-minority Britons on so-called systemic racism.

Take knife crime, which blights so many of Britain’s black communities, including in Lammy’s own patch of Tottenham in north London. Back in 2012, Lammy argued, justifiably, that this was a problem caused in large part by fatherlessness, by family breakdown and broken homes – not just poverty or racial exclusion, as most anti-racist activists so often insist.

During the London riots of 2011, when posh commentators blamed austerity and racism for the looting and wanton violence, Lammy said the real cause was a lack of discipline in the home. Nanny-state laws against smacking, he warned, made parents afraid of physically disciplining their children, even when they are at risk of getting involved in crime. His constituents in Tottenham were expected to raise their kids ‘with knives, gangs and the dangers of violent crime just outside the window’, all while ‘no longer feel[ing] sovereign in their own homes’.

So what happened to this version of Lammy? The Lammy who defended the family. The Lammy preaching tough love. The Lammy who refused to play the race card when others would. The Lammy who, whatever one might think of his various political positions on things, was still in the habit of thinking for himself. Since then, has just foghorned Guardianista groupthink.

Populism, it seems, is what happened to David Lammy. All of his more sensible and nonconformist interventions were before 2016 – the year in which we had the twin revolts of Brexit and Donald Trump. These events broke the brains of liberals and the left. And Lammy, for one, has never been the same since.

Within days of the Brexit vote, Lammy was among the first MPs to call for the referendum to be rerun. Writing in the Observer, he compared the EU referendum, the largest democratic event in UK history, to the rise of fascism and Nazism. ‘We cannot usher in rule by plebiscite, which unleashes the “wisdom” of resentment and prejudices reminiscent of 1930s Europe’, he said. At an anti-Brexit rally in 2019, he compared the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party to both the racist rulers of Apartheid-era South Africa and – you guessed it – the Nazis. When asked on the BBC if he had gone a little bit too far, Lammy claimed his comments were ‘not strong enough’. The Brexiteers were worse than the Nazis, in other words. His side’s loss of a democratic vote, he was essentially saying, was a greater calumny than the mass extermination of Europe’s Jews. To call this unhinged would be an understatement.

His meltdown didn’t end there. Overnight, it seems, Lammy transformed into a hardcore identitarian activist. Suddenly, he was seeing the hidden hand of ‘systemic racism’ in everything. He said the criminal-justice system is racist. Football is racist. Universities are racist. The coronavirus is racist. Climate change is racist.

This intense racial paranoia led him to claim, entirely baselessly, that the death toll of the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy – in which many of those who lost their lives were immigrants or from ethnic minorities – had been covered up by the authorities. Amid the global Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, he bafflingly declared that ‘George Floyd could have been me’.

This deranged, hysterical man is now charged with representing the UK on the global stage. He may now be forced to temper his outbursts for the good of diplomacy. But why on Earth was a liability like David Lammy given his role in the first place?

We live in incredibly serious times. Yet we are cursed to be represented by such unserious politicians.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.