David Lammy facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
David Lammy
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Official portrait, 2024
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| Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs | |||||||||||||||||||
| Assumed office 5 July 2024 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Keir Starmer | ||||||||||||||||||
| Preceded by | The Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Member of Parliament for Tottenham |
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| Assumed office 22 June 2000 |
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| Preceded by | Bernie Grant | ||||||||||||||||||
| Majority | 15,434 (38.4%) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Member of the London Assembly as the 10th Additional Member |
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| In office 4 May 2000 – 4 July 2000 |
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| Preceded by | Office established | ||||||||||||||||||
| Succeeded by | Jennette Arnold | ||||||||||||||||||
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| Born |
David Lindon Lammy
19 July 1972 Holloway, London, England |
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| Citizenship |
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| Political party | Labour | ||||||||||||||||||
| Spouse |
Nicola Green
(m. 2005) |
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| Children | 3 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Education | The King's School | ||||||||||||||||||
| Alma mater | SOAS University of London (LLB) Harvard University (LLM) |
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David Lammy (born 19 July 1972) is an English politician and lawyer who has served as Foreign Secretary since July 2024. A member of the Labour Party, he has been Member of Parliament (MP) for Tottenham since the 2000 Tottenham by-election. Lammy previously held various junior ministerial positions under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown between 2002 and 2010.
Contents
Early life and education
Lammy was born on 19 July 1972 in Whittington Hospital in Archway, North London, to Guyanese parents David and Rosalind Lammy. He and his four siblings were raised solely by his mother, after his father left the family when Lammy was 12 years old. Lammy speaks publicly about the importance of fathers and the need to support them in seeking to be active in the lives of their children. He chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood and has written on the issue.
Lammy grew up in Tottenham, and was educated at Downhills Primary School there, followed by the awarding of an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship, at the age of 10, to sing at Peterborough Cathedral and attend The King's School, Peterborough. He studied at the School of Law, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, graduating with a 2:1. Lammy went on to study at Harvard University, where he became the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School; there he studied for a Master of Laws degree and graduated in 1997. He was called to the bar of England and Wales in 1994 at Lincoln's Inn. He was employed as an attorney at Howard Rice in California from 1997 to 1998, and with D.J. Freeman from 1998 to 2000. He is a visiting lecturer at SOAS. Lammy is also a presenter on LBC and hosts a weekly Sunday show, from 10am to 1pm.
Political career
In 2000 he was elected for Labour on the London-wide list to the London Assembly. During the London election campaign Lammy was selected as the Labour candidate for Tottenham when Bernie Grant died. He was elected to the seat in a by-election held on 22 June 2000. Aged 27, he was the youngest Member of Parliament (MP) in the house until 2003 when Sarah Teather was elected.
Minister
In 2002, he was appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Health. In 2003, Lammy was appointed by Blair as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Constitutional Affairs and while a member of the Government, he voted in favour of authorisation for Britain to invade Iraq in 2003. After the 2005 general election, Blair appointed Lammy as Minister for Culture at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
In June 2007, new Prime Minister Gordon Brown demoted Lammy to the rank of Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. In October 2008, he was promoted by Brown to Minister of State and appointed to the Privy Council. In June 2009, Brown appointed Lammy as Minister for Higher Education in the new Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, leading the Commons ministerial team as Lord Mandelson was Secretary of State. He held the position until May 2010 when Labour lost the election.
Opposition backbencher
After Labour lost the 2010 general election, a Labour Party leadership contest was announced. During the contest Lammy nominated Diane Abbott, saying that he felt it was important to have a diverse field of candidates, but nonetheless declared his support for David Miliband. After the election of Ed Miliband, Lammy pledged his full support but turned down a post in the Shadow Cabinet, asserting a need to speak on a wide range of issues that would arise in his constituency due to the "large cuts in the public services".
In 2010 there were suggestions that Lammy might stand for election as Mayor of London in 2012. Lammy pledged his support to Ken Livingstone's bid to become the Labour London mayoral candidate, declaring him "London's Mayor in waiting". Lammy became Livingstone's selection campaign chair. In 2014, Lammy announced that he was considering entering the race to become Mayor of London in the 2016 election.
Following the party's defeat in the 2015 general election, Lammy was one of 36 Labour MPs to nominate Jeremy Corbyn, whom he is good friends with, as a candidate in the Labour leadership election of 2015.
London mayoral candidate
On 4 September 2014, Lammy announced his intention to seek the Labour nomination for the 2016 mayoral election. In the London Labour Party's selection process, he secured 9.4% of first preference votes and was fourth overall, behind Sadiq Khan, Tessa Jowell, and Diane Abbott.
In March 2016, he was fined £5,000 for instigating 35,629 automatic phone calls urging people to back his mayoral campaign without gaining permission to contact the party members concerned. Lammy apologised "unreservedly" for breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations. It was the first time a politician had been fined for authorising nuisance calls.
Return to the frontbench
Lammy endorsed Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner in the 2020 Labour leadership and deputy leadership elections. After Starmer was elected Labour leader in April 2020, Lammy was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice.
In the November 2021 Shadow Cabinet reshuffle, Lammy was promoted to Shadow Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs.
Lammy attended the 2022 Bilderberg meeting in Washington, D.C.
In August 2022, an inquiry found that he had inadvertently breached the MPs' code of conduct. He apologised in a letter to Parliamentary Standards Commissioner Kathryn Stone.
In January 2023, Lammy visited Northern Ireland with Shadow Secretary Peter Kyle and Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Jenny Chapman, visiting Foyle Port to make a statement on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Foreign Secretary
After being re-elected as the MP for the Tottenham constituency in the 2024 general election, Lammy was appointed Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs by Starmer in his ministry on 5 July.
Views
Issues of race, prejudice and equality
Lammy has commented on Britain's history of slavery. He has also criticised the University of Oxford for admitting relatively few black students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. He believes the Windrush scandal concerns injustice to a generation who are British, have made their homes and worked in Britain and deserve to be treated better.
On 5 February 2013, Lammy gave a speech in the House of Commons on why he would be voting in favour of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill 2013, critically comparing the relegation of British same-sex couples to civil partnerships to the "separate but equal" legal doctrine that justified Jim Crow laws in the 20th-century United States.
In January 2016, Lammy was commissioned by then-Prime Minister David Cameron to report on the effects of racial discrimination and disadvantage on the procedures of the police, courts, prisons and the probation service. Lammy published his report in September 2017, concluding that prosecutions against some BAME suspects should be delayed or dropped outright to mitigate racial bias.
He has spoken out against antisemitism within the Labour Party, and attended an Enough is Enough rally protesting against it.
Lammy recorded a Channel 4 documentary for Remembrance Sunday called The Unremembered: Britain's Forgotten War Heroes, which was broadcast on 10 November 2019. In it he reveals how Africans who died in their own continent serving Britain during WWI were denied the honour of an individual grave, despite the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's reputation for equality. The documentary was produced by Professor David Olusoga's production company; Olusoga described the failure to commemorate black and Asian service personnel as one of the "biggest scandals" he had ever come across.
Lammy considers himself English; he said: "I'm of African descent, African-Caribbean descent, but I am English." In March 2021, Lammy was a guest on LBC when he rejected a caller's assertion that the dual identity of African-Caribbean descent and English nationality are impossible.
Other views
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Lammy is a staunch advocate of British membership of the European Union. He supports shared parental leave, which he maintains would "normalise" fathers being an equal parent with the mother, and would mean they become more involved in the raising of children. He points out Scandinavian countries such as Sweden as examples of where governments have successfully made this happen, which he states has also helped increase gender equality.
Personal life
Lammy married the artist Nicola Green in 2005; the couple have two sons and a daughter. Lammy is a Christian. He is also a Tottenham Hotspur F.C. fan. He states that his identity is "African, African-Caribbean, British, English, a Londoner and European". "I'm black, I'm English, I'm British and I'm proud."
In November 2011, he published a book, Out of the Ashes: Britain After the Riots, about the August 2011 riots. In 2020, he published his second book, Tribes, which explored social division and the need for belonging.
Lammy features as one of the 100 Great Black Britons on both the 2003 and 2020 lists. He has regularly been included in the Powerlist as one of the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent, including the most recent editions published in 2020 and 2021.
Honours
- He was sworn in as a member of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council in 2008. This gave him the honorific prefix "The Right Honourable" for life.
- He has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; this gave him the Post Nominal Letters "FRSA" for as long as he remains a Fellow.
