David Lammy became UK Foreign Secretary earlier this month after the Labor Party defeated the Conservative Party in the July 4 general election. Lammy has previously served as Shadow Foreign Secretary since 2021, and held a number of roles before that, having been elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Labor Party in 2000.
In 2018, Lammy wrote an Ideas article for TIME magazine titled “I’m a British Lawmaker. Here’s why I’m protesting Trump’s visit to the UK” In the article, he referred to Trump, the then president of the United States, as “a sociopath who hates women and sympathizes with neo-Nazis”. Lammy went on to argue that Trump “is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long.”
Lammy was asked about his past comments about Trump during a Thursday morning television interview with Sky News. British network journalist Kay Burley asked Lammy: “Apparently you called him [Trump] a ‘neo-Nazi sociopath’ and a ‘tyrant in a wig’. Do you stand by these comments?
In response, Lammy said, “Kay, you’ll be hard-pressed to find any politician who didn’t have something to say about Donald Trump back in the day. But today I’m here as the UK Foreign Secretary, you know I’ve been to Washington DC eight times since I became Shadow Foreign Secretary and now [the] Foreign secretary. I have met with Republicans and Democrats, many of them close to Trump, and we will work with whoever the United States decides to put in the White House and become its next president.”
With the Labor government now in power in the UK, and former President Donald Trump campaigning as the Republican candidate for the 2024 US election, there is a chance the two politicians could end up working together in some capacity.
In the same Sky News interview, Lammy was asked what he thinks of Trump’s vice-presidential pick, Ohio Senator JD Vance, who last week said the UK could become the first “truly Islamic country that will receive a nuclear weapon.” Responding to Vance’s comments, Lammy said, “I don’t recognize those comments. We received votes in the elections from all corners of the country and from all types of people.”
Lammy went on to say that he was able to find “common ground” with Vance, who he met previously. “We are both from poor backgrounds, we both suffer from addiction issues in our family that we have written about, we are both Christians. And now I’ve met him a few times and we’ve managed to find common ground and get along.” Vance famously chronicled his upbringing in his critically acclaimed 2016 memoir titled Country elegy.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
