In his constant and never-failing desire to please whichever audience he’s speaking to, David Lammy once described Trump as a “Neo-Nazi sociopath”. Which is the sort of thing you might call someone if you (a) are a precocious sixth-former in the school debating society, or (b) do not expect ever to be in the same room with the target of your criticisms.
Now, as Britain’s Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, Lammy is our chief representative abroad, including to the United States. Not only has he needlessly thrown a stupid insult at the victor of the 2024 presidential election, but in doing so he has basically accused the American electorate of electing someone unfit for the most important elected office in the world.
The arguments that might be made in defence of Lammy’s opinion are neither here nor there: our foreign secretary needs to maintain the best possible relations with our most important ally. David Lammy has talked himself out of that job.
We cannot allow any foreign power to decide who serves in the UK cabinet and in what position. However, sacking or demoting Lammy at the earliest opportunity would demonstrate to the incoming administration that Starmer is serious about repairing the damage Lammy, by his infantile language, has caused to the special relationship.
This Government may not be all that keen on post-EU “Global Britain”, but given that the last time Trump was in the White House, he was far keener than either his predecessor or his successor to give us a transatlantic trade deal, Lammy’s sacrifice would be a small price to pay for smoothing the way to such a breakthrough.
Beyond the immediate implications for the Government and its foreign secretary, Harris’s humiliating defeat at the hands of a man who, in more serious times, really should never have been able to come within shouting distance of the White House, ought to signal a major rethink of progressive Left-wing politics across the democratic west. But will it?
The lessons were all there to be learned in 2016, when an arrogant, entitled Democratic Party crowned Hillary Clinton as their surefire winner in that year’s election. After all, who could fail to lose against someone as unappealing as Trump? And yet somehow, Clinton’s disdain for working class Americans without college degrees and her obsession with the rights of trans people to use women’s bathrooms in Oklahoma didn’t strike a chord with the electorate. It was a real mystery.
Eight years later, Joe Biden could have chosen to accept the inevitability of his advancing years and allowed his party to choose a new candidate last year, allowing the victor to be subjected to the usual rigours and scrutiny of the primary process.
Instead he made it impossible for the party and the country to choose anyone other than Harris, a woman who, when she stood against Biden for the Democratic nomination in 2020, resigned from the race without winning a single delegate to her party’s national convention.
It wasn’t just the method of her becoming the candidate that rankled with voters; it was her policy platform. Across America – and indeed, across much of the Western world – the curse of woke is wreaking terrible damage to politics and to society.
Gender ideology and critical race theory have their roots in the US, but like any virus, they quickly made their way across the Atlantic. Few viral clips on social media did Harris more harm than the one in which she introduces herself to an audience – from behind a mask, obviously – as “Kamala Harris, she/her”.
It’s not the self-congratulatory smugness that irked; it was the assumption that the cult of the pronoun is now not only obligatory but normal. Does she really not know how much ordinary Americans object to such nonsense? Does she not realise that many voters lump such language in with “taking the knee” and demands by Black Lives Matter protesters to “defund the police”? It’s all toxic – the language, the smugness and the policies that the White House advocated in the last four years to push the agenda.
Labour too must learn the lessons of a second Trump victory before they go too far down the same road. Because if British voters decided to follow the lead of their American cousins, our own politicians would have every reason to be nervous the next time the ballot boxes are opened.
