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Led by pygmies
If Starmer, Lammy and Miliband are the best our elites can produce, Britain is surely ripe for revolution
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.
