David Lammy defended calling Donald Trump a neo-Nazi sociopath, saying every politician had something to say about the former US president “in the past”.
When he was a base deputy in 2018, the now Secretary of Foreign Affairs wrote in Time magazine about the then American leader: “Trump is not just a sociopath who hates women and sympathizes with neo-Nazis. international order that has been the basis of Western progress for so long.”
Read more: Starmer to meet European leaders at summit as PM aims to ‘reset’ relationship
Lammy, who may now have to work with the Trump administration if the Republican presidential nominee is elected again in November, was asked if he supports those comments.
He told Sky News: “You’d be hard-pressed to find any politician who didn’t have something to say about Donald Trump at that time.”
The Tottenham MP said he had been to Washington DC eight times in his capacity as shadow foreign secretary, and now foreign secretary following the Labor Party’s landslide election victory.
“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,” he said.
He added that he had previously met with Trump’s vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, and that they were able to find “common ground.”
“We’re both from poor backgrounds, we both suffered from addiction issues in our family, which we wrote about… both Christians. And now I’ve met him on a few occasions, and we’ve managed to find common ground and move forward,” he said. he.
See more information:
Who is JD Vance?
What could Vance mean for the future of Ukraine and NATO?
Photo by JD Vance: AP
However, he said he did not recognize comments made by Vance in suggesting that the UK could be the “first Islamic nation with nuclear weapons” under Labor.
Vance made the comments last week at the National Conservatism conference in Washington D.C., also attended by former Interior Secretary Suella Braverman.
COVID diagnosis interrupts Biden campaign
Government ministers dismissed the comments but stopped short of openly criticizing Vance, who will become vice president if Trump wins the election in November.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said of Vance’s comments that she did not “recognize this characterization”, while Defense Secretary John Healey said no one in Britain would “recognize this caricature”.
Keep up with the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Sir Keir Starmer’s Labor government has been keen to stress that it will work with whoever the US electorate returns to the White House to protect the so-called US/UK “special relationship”.
Trump chose Vance, a 39-year-old former venture capitalist and senator from Ohio, as his running mate few days after he was target of an assassination attempt on Saturday.
This story originally appeared on News.sky.com read the full story
