David Lammy could not stop praising Donald Trump today, despite once being an especially vocal critic of the incoming US president.
When he was a backbencher in 2018, Lammy called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and a “tyrant”.
In 2019, before Trump’s state visit to the UK, Lammy called the then-president “deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic” and “no friend of Britain”.
But the foreign secretary struck a very different tune this morning as Trump prepares to be sworn in as president for a second time.
Speaking to BBC Radio’s 4 Today ahead of Trump’s inauguration, the cabinet minister was full of admiration for the president-elect.
Presenter Nick Robinson said: “I don’t know say this is any way to embarrass you, but last time you were on the programme you said it was ‘old news’ what you said about Donald Trump in the past.
“You, along with a lot of other people, were pretty rude about him.
“Having met him, having studied him, are you going through a little bit of revisionism of your own? Are you starting to appreciate qualities in the man who is about to become president again, which perhaps you couldn’t see before?”
Lammy said the approach for this government has to be one of “progressive realism” – but Robinson cut in: “As a person, in your heart, when you talk to your friends to your family, do you say, ‘Do you know what, I do see him slightly differently’?”
The cabinet minister – who dined with Trump in New York in September – replied: “The Donald Trump I met was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very very friendly, very warm, I have to say, about the UK, the royal family, Scotland, his relationship with Scotland, his mother.
“That was the Donald Trump I found.”
Lammy also claimed a recent survey found 70% of the world’s population welcome the Republican’s return to the White House, and he praised the way Trump keeps authoritarians “guessing”.
“He’s going to keep you guessing,” Robinson quipped, and pointed to just one of the expected sticking points between the Trump administration and the Labour government – the Chagos deal.
Lammy has negotiated an agreement to hand the British overseas territory to Mauritius in recent months.
However, Labour were unable to get the deal across the line before Trump’s return to power – and the incoming president is expected to block the agreement over security concerns as there is a US-British military base in the archipelago.
Yet the foreign secretary told the BBC that “it’s right and proper that the new administration is able to consider” the agreement before it passes.
Trump is also expected to clash with the UK over a push to end the Ukraine war possibly by forcing Kyiv to hand occupied territory to Vladimir Putin, as well as the trade tariffs the president wants to impose and the defence spending.
But Lammy told BBC Breakfast this morning: “We have a special relationship with the United States, it doesn’t matter who is in the White House or Number 10.”