Shortly before 3 P.M. on a Tuesday in late September, David Lammy, the British Foreign Secretary, sat down at the blond horseshoe-shaped table of the U.N. Security Council chamber, in midtown Manhattan. It was High Level Week for world leaders at the General Assembly. Outside, on First Avenue, the traffic was unbearable. Lammy, who is one of Britain’s most prominent Black politicians, entered office this past July, when the Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, swept to power after fourteen years of Conservative government. His schedule in New York was heavy and mixed: hurried conversations with Najib Mikati, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, about the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel; a U.N. summit to address the global health risks posed by antimicrobial resistance; a “fireside chat” with the actor Benedict Cumberbatch and his wife, Sophie Hunter, an artist and a director, about salt marshes and the ineffable qualities of British soft power.
The Security Council meeting was about the war in Ukraine. A large mural in the chamber, by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg, loomed over Lammy’s right shoulder. At the base, a dragon was removing a sword from its own body. “The world we see in the foreground is collapsing,” Krohg explained seventy-five years ago. When the meeting began, the Russian representative, Vassily Nebenzia, spoke first, saying that he had no intention of listening to “hackneyed, cookie-cutter statements” from Ukraine’s allies, and then pointedly stopped paying attention, scrolling on his phone.
Lammy likes to have an audience. Although only recently appointed to high office, he has been a Member of Parliament for Tottenham, the North London neighborhood where he grew up, for almost a quarter of a century. During the long years of Labour opposition, Lammy, who is fifty-two, hosted a call-in radio show and cultivated a significant presence online. He can sense a viral moment. When his turn came to address the meeting, he directed his words at the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. “I speak not only as a Briton, as a Londoner, and as a Foreign Secretary,” Lammy said. “But I say to the Russian representative, on his phone as I speak”—Lammy hit the words as if he were telling off a teen-ager—“that I stand here also as a Black man whose ancestors were taken in chains from Africa, at the barrel of a gun, to be enslaved, whose ancestors rose up and fought in a great rebellion of the enslaved.” He continued, his voice rising, “Imperialism. I know it when I see it. And I will call it out for what it is.”
The speech took off online. Lammy pinned a clip to his X page. After the meeting, Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, came up and congratulated him. “That was brilliant,” Sikorski told me later. “The U.N. is mostly the so-called Global South. That’s your audience.”
I met Lammy two days later at the Ritz Diner, twenty blocks north of the U.N., in between meetings. His parents migrated to England from Guyana, a former British colony on the north coast of South America. Lammy regularly invokes the U.K.’s imperial past and his own biography, in an attempt to frame current international problems and to find points of connection. “Having a Foreign Secretary that can use the past—but use it to caution the future—this resonates well in that global chamber,” he told me.
It is Lammy’s task—at an inauspicious time—to rediscover Britain’s place in the world after years of antic inwardness, a period defined by Brexit, economic rot, and political entropy that stopped the country from having much of a foreign policy at all. (Lammy’s six Conservative predecessors since 2016 lasted an average of fifteen months in the job; four of them tried to become Prime Minister while in office.) “The world has been shocked, bemused, discombobulated, by our oscillations, our internal seesaw, our isolationism. These are not words that you would generally associate with the U.K.,” Lammy said that morning. “We’re sort of like a tortoise that suddenly turned around and pulled its head in.” Lammy is not like that. His head is out. Thickset and ebullient now, he sang in choirs as a boy and knows how to modulate voice and gesture. If he is anywhere near a table, he uses its surface for grammatical emphasis, tapping and thumping between words. “My job is to say Britain’s back,” he said. “Britain is back on the world stage.”
An aide interrupted, putting a plate heaped with pancakes and bacon in front of him, for a photo intended for his department’s Flickr feed. “O.K. Fine,” Lammy said, obediently picking up a knife and fork, to mime cutting into his breakfast. “God, if I ate that, I would be even fatter than I am,” he added, out of the side of his mouth. He laughed and left the food untouched.
“He makes an impression, right?” Ben Rhodes, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and a deputy national-security adviser in Obama’s Administration, who is a friend of Lammy’s, told me. “I remember meeting him and thinking, Well, this guy’s interesting and full of vigor.”
Lammy earned a master’s degree from Harvard Law School, in the mid nineteen-nineties. He got to know Obama through the school’s Black alumni network and met Rhodes at Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago, in 2007, when he was a junior minister in Tony Blair’s new Labour government. During Obama’s first Presidential campaign, Lammy went canvassing in Wisconsin while his wife, Nicola Green, who is an artist and a social historian, followed the candidate, making a series of prints that now hang in the Library of Congress. When we met in New York, Lammy took out his phone, on which he had a photograph of a recent handwritten note from Obama, encouraging him to “keep up the good fight” as Foreign Secretary. The two men try to have dinner when Obama passes through London. “He grew up without a father. I grew up without a father,” Lammy explained. “Similar backgrounds.”
Rhodes and Lammy became close after 2016, when both men were dealing with political estrangement. Rhodes was working on a memoir of Obama’s Presidency and attempting to process Donald Trump’s first victory, while Lammy was confronting the nationalist instincts behind the Brexit vote and his own party’s leftward turn, under Jeremy Corbyn. “We were both wrestling with the same issues at that time,” Rhodes said. “We were both trying to figure out what it meant to be in this kind of deep opposition.”
During Trump’s first term, Lammy—along with his friend Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London—became one of Britain’s most prominent, and quotable, antagonists of the President. In July, 2018, Lammy joined a march protesting a Trump visit to the U.K. “The president’s threats to NATO and the U.N. are no more logical than arson. His trade wars with the E.U. and China could trigger the next great economic crisis of our times,” Lammy wrote in Time magazine. “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.”
Lammy was at his barber’s, in Tottenham, a little more than three years ago, when he saw that he had missed several calls from Starmer, Corbyn’s successor as Labour leader. Starmer wanted Lammy to be the shadow Foreign Secretary in his opposition Cabinet. Not long afterward, Lammy was a guest on Rhodes’s podcast. Trump came up in conversation, and Rhodes noticed a striking change in his friend’s tone. “He gave this answer that was very reserved,” Rhodes recalled. “And I was, like, Holy shit. This guy is already thinking about being Foreign Secretary. He kind of immediately switched off that valve.” Rhodes likened Lammy to Obama in his tendency to prize the workable option ahead of his inner convictions. “Precisely because he believes that the danger is real,” Rhodes said.
“The Americas are in my lifeblood. My family being from Guyana makes the New World very proximate to me,” Lammy told me at the diner. He has family in New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Georgia. From 2021, he and his team worked assiduously to meet officials from the Biden White House and to court a possible second Trump Administration. Last February, Lammy reached out to Senator J. D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference. The men appeared at an event onstage together, agreeing conspicuously several times. Since then, Lammy has referred to Vance as his friend so often that some of his colleagues roll their eyes. (One Labour peer referred to Lammy’s working-class childhood as his J. D. Vance years.) Lammy is unabashed. He said to me, of Vance, “He talks very passionately about addiction, joblessness, and a sort of cultural dislocation engulfing the community that he grew up in. And, of course, I saw similar things in the community that I grew up in.”
In New York, Lammy was reluctant to answer questions about the U.S. election, which was still six weeks away. Kamala Harris was three points ahead in the polls. His head and his heart were in contrasting places. “That’s a bit hard for me,” he said. When I insisted that he couldn’t look upon a Trump Presidency with equanimity, he replied, “As the chief diplomat, in the end, give me democracy any day, however challenging it is, I suppose is what I am saying.”
What Lammy did not say is that he had dinner plans with Trump that night. He and Starmer, along with Karen Pierce, the British Ambassador, and Sue Gray, Starmer’s then chief of staff, rode the golden elevator up to the fifty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. According to two officials who were briefed on the evening, it was Lammy, rather than Starmer, who led the British charm offensive, laughing at Trump’s jokes, taking a second helping of the entrée, and praising the surroundings. “The Foreign Secretary is kind of a natural at this,” one of the officials said. “He knows America. He knows what kind of person this is.” At one point, Trump lowered the lights to show off the skyline. “It’s a beautiful view of Manhattan,” Lammy told me. “It was a very, very warm evening in many, many ways.”
There is no diplomatic playbook for dealing with the Trump Administration—especially not for America’s closest ally, still trying to find its way in the world five years after leaving the European Union. Everyone agrees that Britain means something in international affairs, but not exactly what or why. Old empires are like old stars in the sky. You can’t tell whether the light actually burned out years ago.
Lammy is not an easy politician to read. “There are so many different Davids that are sort of in one,” a former adviser of his told me. But his instincts are relational, ahead of anything else. “You don’t get from where I started to where I am without finding the common ground,” Lammy told me one afternoon in his office in London, bashing the red leather blotter on his desk. “That is the No. 1 thing I am often trying to do.” This is a darkening time for Lammy’s brand of politics—centrist, flexible, globalist—which is in retreat almost everywhere. But he seemed energized, rather than overwhelmed, by the task. “The history books are far from being written,” he said. “You know, we’re in the midst of it all. Let us reckon with that second Trump term.”
Lammy venerates Ernest Bevin, another working-class Labour politician, who became Britain’s Foreign Secretary in the last weeks of the Second World War. Bevin was an orphan from Somerset, who worked as a farmhand and as a truck driver until he was twenty-nine, when he emerged as a formidable trade unionist and a wartime organizer. Bevin’s grammar and politics were visceral rather than learned. Relying on what he called “the ’edgerows of experience,” Bevin helped to found NATO and wrangled the terms of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. A portrait of King George III hung in his office. “Let’s drink to him,” Dean Acheson, the U.S. Secretary of State, recalled Bevin saying, as he poured a glass of sherry. “If ’e ’adn’t been so stoopid, you wouldn’t ’ave been strong enough to come to our rescue in the war.”
“Ernie Bevin is my hero, because I’m looking at the world as it is, not as I would like it to be,” Lammy said. The last time Labour won power from the Conservatives, in 1997, the U.K.’s G.D.P. was greater than China’s and India’s combined. (Now, together, their economies are seven times larger.) Lammy campaigned hard against Brexit, which was a psychological and institutional disaster for Britain’s foreign-policy class. For forty-three years, until the referendum in 2016, officials in London had refracted every international question through the country’s simultaneous membership in the E.U. and its privileged access to U.S. power. “It was in the DNA of every Foreign Office official on any issue,” John Casson, a former Ambassador to Egypt and adviser to David Cameron, the Prime Minister who called for the Brexit vote, told me. “How can we triangulate the two in a sensible way?”
Theresa May, Cameron’s successor, set up a pair of government departments to manage Britain’s departure from the E.U. and to strike new trade deals around the world. The Foreign Office found itself largely excluded from the U.K.’s most important international negotiations since the Bevin years. “It was a trauma,” Casson said. Career officials discovered that their default mode of thinking about Britain’s place in the world was suspect, too. “They were seen as completely unsound,” Casson continued, “by people who wanted to change the world and change how we operate.”
Britain’s Foreign Secretaries after 2016 included some of the Conservative Party’s most ardent Brexiteers, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss among them. Statecraft was replaced by stunts and nostalgia: Johnson reciting “Mandalay,” by Rudyard Kipling, on a visit to a Buddhist temple in Myanmar (“For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say / Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”); Truss riding on a tank. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which handled diplomacy, was hurriedly merged with the country’s Department for International Development, which dispensed aid. About a third of the nation’s fifteen-billion-pound overseas-aid budget was promptly repurposed to pay the housing costs of asylum seekers in the U.K.
In 2021, the combined department launched a grandiose and under-resourced “Indo-Pacific Tilt”—to project British power in Asia—and a sixty-million-pound refresh of the country’s “GREAT” marketing campaign, which put up posters of Harry Potter, Welsh cheese, and English soccer players in a hundred and forty-five countries around the world. Foreign Office staffers described an atmosphere of puzzlement abroad and low morale at home. “Lammy inherited a battlefield which is full of smoking hulks,” one former ambassador told me. “Just a disaster area.”
The headquarters of the combined Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office is a Victorian confection, built at the height of the British Empire, next to Downing Street. In 1877, the building was described as “a kind of national palace, or drawing room for the nation,” and it drips with alabaster, marble, and allegorical paintings showing Britannia living out her providential role in the world. In the nineteen-sixties, modernizers in both of Britain’s main political parties argued that the building should be pulled down and replaced by a more modest structure.
Lammy likes it as it is. He has a weakness for old and worn English places. “Actually, at this moment, the building is wonderful for me, because history is everywhere,” he told me one November afternoon in London. “I’m at ease with history and at ease with navigating, finding my own place within that history.” Outside, the light was failing over St. James’s Park. “I can certainly see that some people might come in here and be rather daunted by the building. For me, in a way, it’s comfort.”
When Lammy was eleven years old, he won a choral scholarship to the King’s (the Cathedral) School, a state-funded boarding school in Peterborough, in Cambridgeshire. The only Black pupil, he carved his name in a pew of the cathedral, which was consecrated in 1238, and appeared, in a white ruff and a red cassock, on the Christmas edition of “Songs of Praise,” the BBC’s flagship religious program. “I quickly learned that my insecurities, which related to my accent and my skin colour, were supposed to be hidden,” Lammy wrote in “Tribes: A Search for Belonging in a Divided Society,” a part memoir, part political study, which he published in 2020.
Before he became a chorister, Lammy had grown up in a red brick terraced house in Tottenham, one of five children, reared by his mother, Rose, who’d moved to London from Hopetown, a village in northeastern Guyana. Hopetown was founded in 1841 by forty-nine freed African slaves, who had bought the land—former cotton plantations—for two thousand Guyanese dollars, from James Blair, a British M.P.
Rose worked at the Camden Town Tube station and, later, as a local government official, in North London. Lammy’s father, David, was also from Hopetown. He arrived in London in 1956, part of the so-called Windrush generation of West Indian immigrants—British colonial subjects who moved to the mother country after the Second World War. “They came with such a sort of brightness in their eye,” Lammy told me. Dapper and charming, David, Sr., worked as a taxidermist. But he drank and his business failed. The last time Lammy saw his father was on a train platform. Lammy was twelve and heading back to boarding school. David, Sr., died in poverty in Texas in 2003.
Lammy’s education inculcated in him the rituals and expectations of the British establishment. His accent changed. He avoided questions about his family. “When the school holidays came, I did not want to leave,” he wrote. In October, 1985, Lammy watched the TV coverage of a riot that broke out on the Broadwater Farm Estate, a social-housing project two streets away from his house, when a Black woman died of heart failure after her apartment was searched by the police. A white police officer was killed in the violence. Finding his teen-age identity was complicated, Lammy wrote, “when ‘Who I was’ was the very kind of otherness I was trying to escape from.”
As a young lawyer, Lammy modelled himself on Jonathan Rollins, the dashing attorney played by Blair Underwood in “L.A. Law.” Returning home after Harvard, he ran as a Labour candidate in the inaugural elections of the London Assembly, a new public-scrutiny body for the city. Simon Woolley, a co-founder of Operation Black Vote, which aimed to increase the political representation of Black communities in the U.K., remembered Lammy from this time. “He’s slick. He’s ambitious,” Woolley said. “He wants to please, but he’s no one’s fool.”
Lammy had barely served in the assembly before he was selected to stand as the M.P. for Tottenham. In April, 2000, the incumbent, Bernie Grant, died, at the age of fifty-six. Grant, who was born in Guyana, was a charismatic socialist with a national following. The choice to succeed him came down to Lammy or Grant’s white widow, Sharon. Lammy had both the credentials—he was a working-class kid from the borough—and the polish of Blair’s modernized Labour Party. When he was elected, at the age of twenty-seven, Lammy became the youngest member of the House of Commons. People wondered if he would be Britain’s first Black Prime Minister. “In all honesty, he gets elected with great fanfare,” Woolley told me. “And I think there was a bit of time when we questioned whether we got this right.”
That is because, for years, Lammy behaved like just another upwardly mobile Blairite politician. “He was . . . I don’t know what,” the Labour peer I spoke to, who worked with Lammy during the two-thousands, said. “Capable. Unexciting. Normal.” He was one of five Black M.P.s in Westminster. He made the occasional gaffe. Appearing on the BBC quiz show “Mastermind,” in 2009, Lammy was asked which English king came after Henry VIII. “Henry VII?” he replied.
When Labour lost power in 2010, Lammy turned down a junior post in the Shadow Cabinet. He finished fourth in an attempt to become the Labour candidate for London’s mayor. Then Jeremy Corbyn took over the Party. Lammy shed his inhibitions—and found a national platform, in the media—while his future in the Party clouded over. “I think for a long time, he didn’t have David figured out,” the adviser said. “What shifted was a sense of ‘Do you know what? I’m just as good as these people. I’m just going to be me.’ ” In 2016, Lammy accepted an invitation from Cameron to lead a government review of racial bias in the British criminal-justice system. The following year, a close friend of his and his wife’s, a Gambian British artist named Khadija Saye, was killed, one of seventy-two victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in a social-housing block in West London.
That fall, the Guardian began reporting stories of men and women—many of them Lammy’s age, or older—who were being threatened with deportation, decades after arriving from former colonies in the Caribbean. People who migrated to Britain before 1973 and were legally resident in the country lost their jobs and housing, were denied health care and their pensions, and were stopped at the border after going on vacation and refused entry into the U.K., because of gaps in their paperwork.
The Windrush scandal, as it became known, was the product of the Conservatives’ “hostile environment” policy toward undocumented migrants. As of last year, more than seven thousand people have claimed compensation from the government. “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told to go home, or had my Britishness questioned,” Lammy wrote in “Tribes.” “The Windrush Scandal confirmed our worst fears.”
On April 16, 2018, Lammy prepared to speak about the injustice from the backbenches of the House of Commons. He had planned to talk about his parents, but feared that he would cry. He texted a researcher to ask when the first British ships arrived in the Caribbean—1623—and brought down his fury in a short, rhythmic, and upsetting speech. “This is a day of national shame,” Lammy thundered. “Let us call it as it is: if you lay down with dogs, you get fleas, and that is what has happened with the far-right rhetoric in this country.”
Lammy does not remember speaking the words. “In a way, it was almost like my ancestors came through me,” he said. “I was standing on their shoulders. I was powered up.” People who had known Lammy for years had a feeling of arrival. “There’s a moment in people’s political life where you can bring the whole backstory to that one moment,” Woolley told me. Rhodes draws a line between Lammy’s advocacy for the Windrush generation and what now drives him as a post-imperial Foreign Secretary. “David’s whole life has been, in part, an effort to reconcile the fact that he’s British, even though the British fucked his people over,” Rhodes told me. “And that, in miniature, is kind of what the U.K. has to do around the world.”
Lammy describes his approach to foreign policy as “progressive realism.” In an essay for Foreign Affairs last year, he defined this as “the pursuit of ideals without delusions about what is achievable.” Skeptics point out that progressive realism is more of a spectrum than a strategy, and that it can be used to explain almost any decision. But British officials told me that it was a helpful starting point. “You’re going to try and make the world better, but you’re going to deal with it and use tactics that rely on the world as you find it,” one explained. It’s also helpfully unthreatening to ideological opponents. “I told him as a Republican I can go halfway,” Senator James Risch, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joked at an event discussing Lammy’s agenda last year. “We’re really big on realism. This progressive stuff, eh . . .”
A large part of progressive realism involves redefining worthy goals in more practical, and transactional, terms. Since taking office, Lammy has encouraged officials not to use words such as “help” or “support” or “assistance” in their dealings with the Global South, seeking a more equal—and commercial—relationship on both sides. The change in approach comes after a precipitous falloff in the U.K.’s overseas-aid spending in recent years and is nothing like the ambitious poverty-reduction agenda of the previous Labour government. “It’s not the development of Gordon Brown and Tony Blair,” Lammy told me. “This is a world in which China’s Belt and Road has happened. This is a world in which we see Russia selling mercenaries to African countries.” He went on, “It’s about the dealmaking. It’s not just about sort of old-style paternalism. That’s just not going to cut it.”
The most pressing task for Lammy has been to undo the worst diplomatic mishaps of the Tories. In September, 2020, Boris Johnson’s government set out, in its own words, to “break international law in a very specific and limited way” in a dispute with the E.U. Shortly before taking office, Liz Truss declined to say whether President Emmanuel Macron of France was “a friend or foe.” During his premiership, Rishi Sunak threatened to remove Britain from the European Convention on Human Rights in order to implement his policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda—mainly refugees who had crossed the English Channel in inflatable boats. “The trust in British politics was, I would say, close to zero,” a European diplomat told me, of the most pugnacious Brexit years.
Starmer cancelled the Rwanda plan on his first day in office, and, since then, he and Lammy have sought to restore the U.K. as a sober, law-abiding nation. In October, the new Labour government announced its intention to give up sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago: some sixty islands, including Diego Garcia—home to an important U.S. military base—in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The deal would hand the islands to Mauritius, half a century after some two thousand Chagossians—mostly descendants of enslaved people—were removed by the British to make way for the military installation. It followed years of campaigning by exiled Chagossians, a ruling against the U.K. at the International Court of Justice, and increasing international isolation, which was partly stoked by Brexit. In May, 2019, just five countries supported Britain in a U.N. General Assembly vote on the future of the islands.
Describing the draft treaty with Mauritius in Parliament, Lammy said that the agreement “addresses the wrongs of the past,” while securing Diego Garcia for the U.S. military. The proposal included a ninety-nine-year lease on Diego Garcia, plus an option to renew. “The State Department, the agencies, the Pentagon, all think this is an incredible deal,” he assured me in December.
Lammy has also sought to use international law to craft British policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza. Last September, he advised his colleagues to suspend thirty export licenses (out of a total of three hundred and fifty) for sales of weapons that were being used by the Israel Defense Forces, because of a “clear risk” that they were violating international humanitarian law. Two months later, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, Britain’s Attorney General, Richard Hermer—a former colleague and friend of Starmer’s—said that the U.K. would comply if either man tried to enter the country. For his part, Lammy has told M.P.s that the law gives him no choice. “That does not allow me any discretion,” he said.
The Conservatives’ ultimate foreign-policy misstep was Brexit. On Lammy’s first weekend in the job, he flew to Berlin and Stockholm, to meet his counterparts, and then to Chobielin, in northern Poland, to visit the country manor, or dwór, of the Polish Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski.
This was the beginning of what Starmer’s government calls its “reset” of relations with the E.U.—not a reversal of Brexit, but a rapprochement. “There is a new atmospherics,” Sikorski told me. In mid-July, the U.K. hosted forty-five European leaders, including Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, where eight hundred scones were served to the guests for tea. Starmer met Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, five times within three months of taking office. “The intensity of the reach-out is really remarkable,” the European diplomat said. “Now we have to work on the substance.”
The reset is the object of both hope and dismay. The “EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement”—a.k.a. Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal—which was signed in 2020, cast British businesses far outside the E.U.’s single market, causing inevitable barriers to trade. With the threat of U.S. tariffs in the air, and a listless economy, it seems logical for a centrist British government, led by politicians who opposed Brexit, to seek closer ties once again. “The only thing they have to do, and there won’t be a list of Chagosses that make up for it, is improve relations with Europe,” Bronwen Maddox, the director of Chatham House, the London-based foreign-affairs think tank, said. “If they want growth, it’s sitting right there across the Channel. Europe is not growing very fast, but the source of Britain growing faster is there.”
And yet the reset has been oddly tentative. The only results, so far, have been the sketch of an E.U.-U.K. security pact and a bilateral deal with Germany, focussed mainly on defense and technology. Fairly modest E.U. proposals—such as coördinating veterinary standards or a youth-mobility scheme, to allow British and European students to study abroad more easily—seem too ambitious for Starmer and his Cabinet to contemplate. “There’s definitely a lot of disappointment in how the Labour government has approached the E.U. and Brussels,” Luigi Scazzieri, of the Centre for European Reform, told me.
It’s not all Britain’s fault. France and Germany are in political turmoil, and the E.U.’s prodigious decision-making architecture moves slowly. But there is an unmistakable sense that, aside from the scones and the atmospherics, neither Starmer nor Lammy knows exactly what he is asking for. “Essentially, there’s little to discuss with the E.U. until the U.K. internally sorts out what it wants as a package, and that’s not happened yet,” Scazzieri said. During last year’s election campaign, Labour leaders were concerned about losing support among pro-Brexit voters and promised not to reënter the E.U.’s single market or customs union, or to follow its freedom-of-movement migration rules—commitments that now look ultra-cautious in the light of the Party’s huge parliamentary majority. “They were a political necessity,” the Labour peer told me, of the promises. “But involving a high economic cost.”
In December, the European Council on Foreign Relations found that sixty-eight per cent of British voters—including more than half of those who had voted to leave the E.U.—would now accept both a return to the single market and freedom of movement. “My personal feeling is that they should be a bit less afraid,” the European diplomat said.
Hovering over all these decisions—like a storm system forming off the coast—is the second Trump Administration. Lammy and his team are confident that the British government is much more prepared than it was in 2016. “We are the best-connected embassy in Washington. No one else comes close,” one aide told me. British officials have decided to model their approach, at least in part, on that of Shinzo Abe, the former Prime Minister of Japan, who was killed at a political rally in 2022. Abe was an early visitor to Trump Tower, in November, 2016, and a keen golfing partner of the President. “Pragmatic, considered, clear in his own position—but also understanding where Donald Trump was coming from” is how Lammy characterized Abe’s diplomacy. Last year, Lammy’s staff sought advice from Kenneth Weinstein, a Japan specialist at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., and a close friend of Abe’s. “My sense with President Trump is you can always get back into his good graces, if you work hard enough and offer the respect he deserves,” Weinstein said. “That’ll be the test.”
The test is ongoing. In July, Starmer was one of the few foreign leaders to call Trump after he survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The dinner at Trump Tower with Lammy in September was considered a success by the British. But there have been squalls, too. It was reported during the summer that Lammy’s team was in regular contact with the Trump campaign; Chris LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, dismissed the story as fake news. “Other than a perfunctory 10 min meeting there is no contact,” he wrote on X. In October, the Trump campaign filed a Federal Election Commission complaint for “blatant foreign interference” against the Labour Party, for allegedly facilitating the travel and accommodation of volunteers to work on the campaign of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Weinstein flagged the Chagos Islands deal and the U.K.’s willingness to honor the I.C.C.’s arrest warrants for Israeli leaders as early points of tension with the new Administration. Both Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of State, and Mike Waltz, his choice for national-security adviser, have opposed Britain’s giving up sovereignty over Diego Garcia, arguing that it would cede U.S. influence in the Indian Ocean to China. Conservatives in the U.K. have also expressed doubts about the plan. “The question is going to be Chagos and the I.C.C.,” Weinstein said. “And then, you know, things could spin down worse from there.”
In 2019, Kim Darroch, then the British Ambassador to the U.S., was forced to resign after his diplomatic cables about the first Trump Administration—describing it as clumsy and inept—were leaked to the press. I asked Darroch if all the careful groundwork laid by Lammy and Starmer will make any difference once Trump returns to the White House. “The short, one-word answer to all of these hopes is said with a deep tone of skepticism,” he replied. “Maybe.”
In early December, wearing white tie, Starmer spoke at the Lord Mayor’s annual banquet, in London, and disavowed the idea that Britain now faces a choice between tying itself closer to the E.U. or to a Trump-led U.S. “I reject it utterly,” he said. “Attlee did not choose between allies. Churchill did not choose.” Deriding false choices is fine for a foreign-policy speech. But since Brexit, the U.K. has been economically and strategically off compass. Until the country settles on its next long-term destination, either closer to the E.U. or firmly within America’s orbit, every confounding global problem—the climate crisis, A.I., financial regulation, a domineering China, a Trump-led trade war—will require asking which way to turn.
British officials know this and sometimes despair that their country has not found a way to be more hardheaded. “There’s no real theory of change and theory of power in the Foreign Office,” Casson, the former Ambassador, said. “There’s a sort of desire not to offend people.” Optimists sometimes envisage a post-Brexit U.K. as a “superconnector”—a kind of entrepôt, embodied by London’s financial center, court system, and expensive town houses—sheathed in a memory of empire. But realists argue that a fork in the road is coming. “Do we fold in with the U.S. and ask for something in exchange for basically backing them wholesale, in competing with China? Likewise, how close do we want to get to the E.U.?” one serving diplomat asked. “You have to make some serious choices about where the U.K. sits. That’s the big test for Lammy over the next few years.”
This past fall, I joined Lammy on a brief visit to Kyiv. At 1:42 a.m., the Foreign Secretary walked down a railway platform in Przemyśl, on Poland’s eastern border, and boarded a Ukrainian diplomatic train alongside Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State. Lammy has made it a point to travel with his counterparts. This was the first joint visit by Britain’s and America’s top diplomats in more than a decade. They were in listening mode. Zelensky had replaced half his government the previous week—the biggest reshuffle since the start of the war—and Blinken and Lammy were considering the Ukrainian request to use European Storm Shadow missiles and the U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to strike targets inside Russia.
The train entered Kyiv just after the morning rush hour. The four-vehicle British convoy did its best to keep pace with the American cavalcade, as it barrelled through the streets of the city. (The U.S. State Department spends almost as much on its Embassies as the U.K. does on its entire diplomatic operation.) At a conference at the Mariyinsky Palace, to mark ten years since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Lammy once again drew on his ancestral past. “I feel personally about that battle against imperialism,” he told delegates. British politicians like to describe the U.K. as Ukraine’s “staunchest ally,” and Lammy has taken up the rhetoric with aplomb. “Crimea will be free. Ukraine will be free,” he promised. “Slava Ukraine.” In the afternoon, Lammy visited a fire station to inspect one of sixty British fire trucks that have been given to the country. “I know you don’t like the term, but you are heroes in our time,” he told Yuriy Tsykenyuk, who leads a mobile rescue center that responds to missile and drone strikes.
The war in Ukraine has been a lifeline for British diplomacy. Boris Johnson, after the miasma of Brexit and his government’s slapdash handling of the pandemic, seized on the U.K.’s onetime role as a protector of European security. “Britain was drowning,” Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister until last fall, told me. “The stance that the United Kingdom took, with regards to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, saved the reputation of British foreign policy.”
In material terms, the U.K. has been the third-largest source of military aid to Ukraine—after the U.S. and Germany—but only Johnson got a croissant made in his honor by a Kyiv pâtisserie, with a frizz of meringue to denote his messy hair. “He won all the hearts,” Kuleba said. Under the Conservatives, Britain was the first country to supply antitank weapons, battle tanks, and long-range missiles to Ukraine, along with open-ended financial assistance: some three billion pounds per year. Kuleba described a British “hunger for being first, for showing the leadership, for triggering conversations others were reluctant to do.” Labour’s approach has been much the same. “We have to stay the course. One of my jobs is to cajole, to encourage, to support, to beef up, to rally, if you like, European colleagues to Ukraine’s cause,” Lammy said. “This is existential for us.”
But the fervor and bipartisan character of Britain’s support for Ukraine does not disguise its brittleness. It is one thing to be first, but the U.K. has delivered fourteen tanks to Ukraine, less than half the number supplied by Slovenia and Croatia. (Poland has sent more than three hundred.) At one point in Kyiv, we stopped by the British Embassy. “Britain is GREAT” posters lined the walls. An air-conditioner dripped onto the floor. Amid a wash of previously announced funds and loan guarantees, the official press release describing Lammy’s visit disclosed a meagre twenty million pounds in additional aid, to pay for repairs to Ukraine’s electricity grid.
The U.K. tends to be spared the blame directed at other European democracies for having allowed their military power to wither. But its own has withered, too. Between 2010 and 2017, British defense spending fell by twenty-two per cent, and, although it has increased in headline terms since then, day-to-day spending on the armed forces has continued to contract. “The U.K. has always been quite concerned with status-seeking,” Richard Whitman, a professor of politics and international relations at the University of Kent, said. That’s why the country has two aircraft carriers and a hundred-billion-pound nuclear-weapons program, but the entire British Army could fit inside Manchester United’s soccer stadium, with a few seats to spare.
Since Trump’s election, in November, various potential peace plans for Ukraine have circulated, some of which have included a demilitarized zone and a European peacekeeping force, backed by a U.S. security guarantee. But, unlike France, for example, British officials have been noticeably skittish about the possibility of deploying soldiers, under any scenario. “We are not committing U.K. troops to the theatre of action,” Lammy told reporters in late November. According to a recent study by the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee, the U.K. is already struggling to meet its current NATO obligation to field a single war-fighting division.
When I spoke to a former senior official in Trump’s first Administration about Britain’s credibility as a military partner, he recalled Jim Mattis, the former Secretary of Defense, complaining, “They just can’t get their shit together.” (In response, Mattis described the U.K. military as “grossly underfunded” but said that he “never doubted that the Brits would fight, and fight well, when the chips are down.”) The former official went on, “They have kind of skated. I think the tradition and history of the relationship is what’s permitted that to happen.” He doubted that the U.K. would be able to contribute to a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine, even if it wanted to. “It’s a conceptually good outcome,” he said. “But when told to go do it, their Minister of Defense is going to say, With what and by whom?”
In conversations with Lammy about the war, he insisted that Trump was a winner, albeit an unpredictable one, who would not sell Ukraine short, or leave Europe’s eastern border unstable. “I’m focussed on the now,” Lammy said, “to get Ukraine in the strongest possible position into 2025.” But the unambiguous—and largely unexamined—nature of the U.K.’s support for Ukraine means that there isn’t a Plan B if the dynamic of the war shifts away from Kyiv this year. “The U.K. has a very big stake, but it doesn’t have a say,” Whitman said. “If there is the tapping on the shoulder from the Trump Administration, then that puts the U.K. in the worst of all possible worlds. It’s quite difficult to predict how the U.K. will manage that.”
Elsewhere in Europe, Russia’s recent superiority on the battlefield and Trump’s impatience with the conflict have contributed to a gloomy acceptance that Putin may be able to claim a form of victory. In late November, every Swedish household received a thirty-page booklet giving advice on what to do in case of war. Germany is mapping its underground shelters for a new emergency app. Kuleba urged the British government, and Lammy, to rediscover the diplomatic zest that the U.K. had shown in the early months of the invasion. “If the purpose to remain ‘Great’ is still valid, you have to take a different approach,” he said. Experienced British diplomats whom I spoke to, however, were skeptical that the U.K. would have any grounds to resist what the Germans call a Diktatfrieden—an imposed, and unsatisfying, peace—mandated by the Trump Administration. Darroch told me, “Our job is to persuade them not to do that. But I don’t think you will get Europe united.” He continued, “There is an undercurrent. Even if it looks on the surface like we are all supporting Ukraine, a lot of people are praying for this war to end.”
Lammy enjoys being the Foreign Secretary. “I’m very clear that this is the pinnacle of my career,” he told me. At a recent reception, in St. James’s Palace, he ran into Woolley, his old friend from Operation Black Vote. “He leaned in,” Woolley recounted, “and he said, ‘I’m loving it. It’s bear-trap laden, but it’s something I feel confident about doing.’ ” Woolley was impressed, to a certain extent. “There will be a point in which people will say, O.K., it’s easy to be safe, and it’s wonderful that you’ve survived,” he said. “But you’re not there for either, you’re there to move the dial.” Lammy has taken a relentless “wheels-up” approach to the job. In his first five months, he visited more than fifty countries, at a rate of one every three days. When we met one Friday in his office, he briefly forgot where he had been that week. “Moldova,” an aide supplied.
He is the diplomatic face of a curious government. In numerical terms, Labour’s majority in the House of Commons makes it one of the most powerful British administrations of the past hundred years. Since taking office, however, it has been bumbling and unsure of itself. In October, after identifying economic growth as the country’s No. 1 priority, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, published a tax-raising budget that, so far, has only made matters worse. Starmer has relaunched his government at least twice. In early December, after shaking up his team in Downing Street, the Prime Minister replaced the five “missions” articulated during Labour’s election campaign with six “milestones”—somewhat dour domestic-policy targets—by which he wants voters to judge the government. “Foreign policy is a little bit ‘nice to have’ for them,” a former Party official told me, of the ultra-pragmatic inner circle that now surrounds Starmer. “Their question would be, Does it make Keir look Presidential? That leads you to quite a bad place. There’s not a natural stance.”
And yet, there is every reason to think Labour could rule Britain for the next ten years. And what other Western incumbent government can say that? The day after Trump’s victory, when Lammy’s previous remarks about him were raised in the House of Commons (sample tweet: “He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser”), a spokesperson for Starmer said that Lammy would serve a full five-year term as the Foreign Secretary. “People expect this Labour government to get a second term,” Lammy said. “They’re looking to Britain for a degree of stability over this next decade. That’s a big opportunity for us.”
As Trump’s Inauguration approached, the air of hopeful preparation in British foreign-policy circles gave way to something closer to concern. “The unknowns are significant,” an official texted me. Attempting to decode Trump’s newfound desire to acquire Greenland, Lammy sounded as if he were trying to excuse the behavior of a drunk relative at a wedding. “I think that we know from Donald Trump’s first term that the intensity of his rhetoric and the unpredictability sometimes of what he said can be destabilizing,” Lammy told the BBC. “It’s not going to happen.” Last week, an anti-extremism unit at the Home Office was reported to be investigating Elon Musk’s tweets, after Musk took an avid interest in a long-standing British scandal, involving British Asian grooming gangs and child sexual abuse. Musk accused Starmer, the former prosecutor of England and Wales, of being “complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN.” Lammy assured reporters, with an air of desperation, that Musk would be confined to a “domestic portfolio” in the Trump Administration.
On January 15th, the government conceded that the Chagos Islands deal would not go ahead until it had been reviewed by Trump and his officials. The Conservative Party’s shadow Foreign Secretary, Priti Patel, crowed, “This is a complete humiliation for Keir Starmer and David Lammy.”
To somehow keep a lid on things, Starmer has chosen Peter Mandelson, a longtime ally of Blair and a former E.U. trade commissioner, as Britain’s new Ambassador to Washington. Mandelson is a deeply charming, borderline unctuous character. Shortly before he was appointed, in late December, he praised Lammy’s work so far with the incoming Administration. “Absolutely spot on,” Mandelson said. He joked about the limits of the U.K.’s latitude in international affairs. “We don’t always have to ask the question What do the Americans think, or what do the Americans want us to do? But it’s the right second or third question.” On X, LaCivita, Trump’s campaign manager, described Mandelson as an “absolute moron.”
The last time I spoke to Lammy, he was eating an early lunch at his desk. I mentioned something that John Casson, the former Ambassador and Cameron adviser, had said: that for more than seventy years, Britain’s foreign policy had been defined first by the clarity of the Cold War and then by its membership in the E.U. “We never wondered which side to be on,” Casson had observed. Now those certainties are gone. “Strategy is not really a document or a set of goals,” he had continued. “It’s a posture. It’s like sailing a boat in choppy waters—you are going to have to tack left and right, but you know you have to get over there.” I asked Lammy what was guiding him. “I think it’s pragmatic,” he replied. “I accept they are choppy waters. They are choppy waters,” he added, before finding his stride. “But never write off the British.” ♦
Comments
Leave a Comment