Britain’s Foreign Secretary Braces for the Second Trump Age

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.”