David Lammy on what he really thinks of Keir, Rishi, Farage — and why he’ll cry if he’s made foreign secretary

David Lammy, dressed head to toe in black, eyes twinkling, laughing uproariously, is in an ebullient mood. The election is nigh and a Labour landslide looks all but inevitable. When I ask him about how he will feel if he is made foreign secretary, however, he stops for a moment and wipes a tear from his eye.

‘I think I will feel overwhelmingly emotional,’ he says, ‘because my parents aren’t alive, but I know that they would have been stunned — it’s down to them in many ways. I have got aunts and uncles who are that Windrush generation and they’re in their 80s and I will certainly make a beeline to them. I shall have to try and cry off-camera.’

We meet in a school on the Broadwater Farm estate in Lammy’s constituency of Tottenham. The estate is a politically charged address, famous as the setting of the murder of policeman Keith Blakelock in the 1985 Tottenham riots, and the home of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by police in 2011. Unlike most MPs, Lammy was born nearby and raised in the constituency he represents, he helped build the school here, his cousins grew up on the estate and his family lived close by.

In person, Lammy is chatty, fun, warm, quick to emit an infectious belly laugh, and, incredibly unusually for a politician, careful to answer every question. He has that nebulous quality so essential in a politician, that people criticise Sir Keir Starmer for lacking: a light, easy charisma.

I ask him how close he is to Starmer. ‘What do I say? I have huge personal respect for Keir,’ he says. ‘I thought he was the right guy. I got one thing wrong, which was that I told him that it would take 10 years. He said he’d do it in five and he was right. We’re both lawyers, he’s more senior than I am, both very much north London, we live relatively close to each other, and sadly when we go to football, Arsenal tends to beat Spurs more often than I would like. It’s hard watching football with your boss, particularly if your team wins, which did happen once. I had to sort of keep it down a bit… It will be remarkable, absolutely remarkable, if we are successful and he has pulled that off.’

Diane Abbott has been all over the news with rumours Starmer tried to stop her from standing. ‘I’ve known Diane Abbott all of my political career,’ Lammy says carefully. ‘I have huge respect for Diane. We aren’t in the same political place, we don’t agree politically… I do think that her suspension went on too long. And I’m really pleased that she’s able to stand. If she wants to stand, she should be able to stand. She’s represented, I think, the constituency for 37 years, and it’s a decision that she must make and I’m glad that it’s resolved.’

I ask him if he likes his foreign secretary counterpart, David Cameron. ‘I’ve actually been able to have very, very good personal relationships with David Cameron.’ Of Rishi Sunak, he says: ‘He’s got to stand by some of the decisions he’s made and some of them are wrongheaded. But I do believe in politics you’ve got to be able to disagree agreeably and that tradition, which felt quite strong when I arrived here in parliament 24 years ago, is not what it was.’ What about Farage? ‘I’ve had a chat with Nigel Farage’.

An ability to cross cultural and political divides is in Lammy’s DNA. He grew up in a poor immigrant family, but his X-Factor moment, as he describes it, was when he won a scholarship to attend a state boarding school in Peterborough, an experience he credits as being life-changing. In a backstory that is almost cinematic, he studied law at SOAS then was the first Black Briton to go to Harvard Law School. He also must be the only person in the House of Commons who used to work in Tottenham High Road KFC. Impeccably connected, he counts Barack Obama and Condoleezza Rice as friends, and has just rocketed in at No2 on Tatler’s new Social Power Index along with his artist wife, Nicola Green.

I first noticed what an exceptional politician Lammy was when he starred in the 2015 BBC documentary This is Tottenham, which featured his tireless work and affable nature helping the desperate and the dispossessed in his constituency. More recently, he charmed people with his LBC show, and his latest book, Tribes, which covers his ancestral roots in slavery, is a clever, interesting piece of work.

He is also a fiercely London MP, and whenever the capital is thrown into crisis — whether it be the 2011 riots or the 7/7 bombings, or Grenfell or the Windrush scandal — Lammy is always there, campaigning at the forefront. ‘I think the N15 postcode is one of the most diverse in Europe, if not the most diverse,’ he says of the area he represents. ‘There is still a lot of deprivation here and this estate that we’re on, and the school would tell you, there are many children here on free school meals whose parents are really struggling in this environment. We have one of the highest temporary accommodation homelessness lists in the country in this constituency. There are huge challenges, and I think that the past 14 years, particularly with the collapse in public services, the abandonment of neighbourhood policing has had serious effects here in Tottenham, particularly in relation to knife crime.’

Knife and gun crime in London both leapt by 20 per cent last year amid a surge in blade robberies, teenage homicides and firearms offences. But when I ask Lammy if we should bring back widespread use of stop and search, he hesitates and tells me about the time he was stopped and searched at just 12 years old. ‘I remember walking up Lawrence Road, it’s at the heart of Tottenham, and in those days I had a sort of curly perm — I thought I looked like a young Michael Jackson, but I don’t know what I looked at, because I had national health glasses. But I remember being surrounded by, I don’t know, four or five officers and told that I met the description of someone who’d just completed a mugging, and [I was] stretched out, told to stretch my arms. I was absolutely terrified. Absolutely terrified. I remember it was terror that I felt. And then humiliation, because I was so scared that I wet myself.’

He pauses, before saying, ‘Of course there is a place for intelligence-led stop and search, but it’s a tool when used badly that alienates communities.’

Jeremy Corbyn, who Lammy backed for Labour leader — later saying it was something he ‘regrets’ — recently said in an interview with the Evening Standard that Lammy is a man who ‘seems to have a lot of conversions in his life’, and this must be one of them. Previously Lammy has railed against stop and search, calling it ‘ineffectual and racially unjust’, and one criticism of him is that his beliefs are concerningly flexible, or perhaps more generously you could say that he is capable of changing his opinion when the facts change, which is fair enough. In 2016, for example, he voted against renewing Trident, saying that it went against his Christian faith. Today he says ‘the nuclear deterrent is paramount’.

The shadow cabinet routinely mocked Sunak’s call for National Service, but it’s something Lammy has called for many times. He rails against Thatcher’s neo-liberalism, even though he was a direct beneficiary, and of course he disputes entirely that the chance he was given by admission to a boarding school by a scholarship will be torpedoed for future children with Labour’s pledge to end private schools’ VAT exemption, hugely increasing costs.

In the past he has called Donald Trump a ‘woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’ and a ‘profound threat to the international order’, but today he is more circumspect. ‘The bottom line is if I become foreign secretary it’s my duty, and it’s a huge honour, to work with whoever is in the White House. I’d happily go to Mar-a-Lago if I was invited.’

Lammy was born in 1972 in Whittington Hospital. His parents emigrated from Guyana, his father in 1956, his mother in 1969. His mother worked in several jobs, at the local Gestetner factory, at Camden Tube and later became a manager at Haringey Council. His father, who worked in a taxidermist factory and left his family when Lammy was just 12, ‘could be violent,’ says Lammy. ‘I did witness some of that. But I would say that my dad’s alcoholism didn’t manifest a lot in violence, it manifested in him being unkempt… I remember one Christmas he bought me a Chopper bicycle and by January he’d sold it.’

Did he ever hear from him again? ‘He actually did make contact through a relative when I went to Harvard. I was in the States, he was in the States, and I got a message about him and I tried to make contact with him — but it was clear that he didn’t want to see me because I don’t think his life had worked out well. In fact he died a pauper and years later I went to his graveside and gave him a headstone.’

Lammy and his wife have three children aged 10, 16 and 18, the youngest of whom they adopted when she was just months old. He turns 52 this month, and is also unusual in Labour’s frontbench in that he has ministerial experience; he served in the most recent Labour government in a number of roles including as higher education minister. He has made a big success of his shadow foreign secretary role, and it’s clearly something he is very passionate about.

The Gaza situation has put his party in a very difficult position, I suggest. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘the starting point is: does the Labour Party want a ceasefire? Yes, it does, and we’ve been calling for one since December. Does the Labour Party want to see aid and relief in Gaza? Yes, it does. Absolutely. Do we recognise the Palestinian cause as just, the desire for a state and security? We do… it’s horrendous, the whole thing is horrendous, but the bottom line is we want it to stop.’

Weeks before we meet Lammy was in Ukraine, ‘with families who saw their relatives massacred in Bucha… I was also with young people who had been kidnapped, taken from Ukraine… to Russia… When you’ve seen the tyranny of the sort of new fascism that Putin represents…’ He trails off. ‘So of course we will work together with the US… we are here to defend freedom and much of the global community does depend on that special relationship between the US and the UK. And that is a serious relationship that I take deadly seriously.’

Of course we have dire problems at home as well as abroad, from NHS waiting lists to spiralling rents, to debt. When I ask him what Labour’s plan is for the 9.3 million people in Britain who are not working or looking for work, Lammy is clear that they will not be able to transform things overnight.

‘My sense is in this general election there’s quite a lot of cynicism in the public because things have gone so badly wrong, and I’m now talking about having five prime ministers in such a short space of time, the Liz Truss experiment, particularly the trashing of our economy and our reputation across the world. I think the truth is it affects all of us in politics. All of us. And look, to some extent, the Corbyn experiment in the Labour Party was a mistake and that does affect us as well.’

Later, when criticising the Tory spending plans he says: ‘It feels to me like a Corbyn manifesto, rosy in the garden but… the public rejected it because the money wasn’t there. The money isn’t there.’

Will the people of Tottenham miss Lammy terribly if he becomes foreign secretary and spends his time flying around the world? ‘There’s a balance that you have to strike,’ he says. ‘I think if you have good people in your office, people know that you’re there when they need you… Doing your surgeries is important. I do mine on a Friday. I still do physical surgeries. I want to be able to see people.’

As for his London life, Lammy loves Granny’s Caribbean on Stroud Green Road, he has a trainer, though struggles to fit exercise in, and likes a 5k run in Finsbury Park — though his favourite park is next to where we are now, Lordship Rec, where he dedicated a bench to his parents. Happiest London memory? ‘Oh, there’s so many,’ he says beaming. ‘So many.’