It is the end of a long day, and David Lammy admits to feeling tired as he welcomes me into his Westminster office. The fatigue is understandable. I am interviewing the shadow foreign secretary in the first moment of political calm for what feels like several months, and perhaps the last for several more: the day is sandwiched between Jeremy Hunt’s military-style takeover of the British government, the sacking of Suella Braverman and the fracking debate that precipitates Liz Truss’s resignation.

Lammy may be tired but he looks happy, even buzzing. He has every reason to be. There’s an electric atmosphere on the parliamentary estate. While only a few months ago Labour was cautiously optimistic about forming a minority government, Truss’s disastrous premiership has opened up Opposition poll leads of up to 36 points and widespread talk of a Blair-style Labour landslide.

Lammy shadowed Truss as foreign secretary until September, so I begin by asking how she managed to fail as prime minister so quickly and dramatically.

His answer is not ungenerous. Truss was helpful on Ukraine, he says, and kept him fully briefed. Yet he offers a brutal assessment of her failings. “My experience of her was that she could sometimes shoot from the hip. I think her bizarre comments inviting young British men to go out and fight in Ukraine, which were then struck down by the Ministry of Defence, was an example of that. Sometimes she could also be very ideological. And I think if you combine the ideological libertarian bent with a lack of empathy… you end up where we are.”

Was Boris Johnson empathetic? “I think Boris is a serial narcissist. But he’s a charismatic narcissist. He’s eminently watchable and there’s no doubt about it, the guy has a good sense of humour, and charisma and sense of humour will take you very far. Maybe too far. But that covers up things like empathy.”

“I think you’re going to do better if you’re the kind of politician that is able to give the public a big hug. Now, I’m that kind of politician”

Empathy seems a good metric for judging Lammy’s political career. He frequently refers to his Tottenham constituents and seems genuinely motivated by the ability of politicians to change people’s lives. In 2020 he even wrote a book about it, Tribes, one of the best books by a contemporary politician I have read. He explores in great detail how people need to go beyond their narrow political and social groups and talk to each other more. In the end it seems to come down to basic human engagement. “I think you’re going to do better if you’re the kind of politician that is able to give the public a big hug,” he tells me. “Now, I’m that kind of politician.”

Perhaps wisely for someone auditioning to be Britain’s top diplomat, Lammy chooses his words with care. Yet he’s relaxed enough to engage meaningfully with questions. To my relief, he avoids easy party lines and clichés, and proves thoughtful and frank throughout our discussion. Spread out in an armchair in his office, I picture him holding a tumbler of whiskey and imagine he’d be a charismatic host of one of those famous north London dinner parties so obsessively detested by the Daily Mail.

The first sign of caution comes when I ask him about the current political crisis. Lammy is straightforward enough when discussing prospects for an early election: “I don’t see the circumstances in which Conservative MPs are effectively going to vote against their government because I don’t see the circumstances in which turkeys vote for Christmas,” he says. But he gets wary when I ask about the mess now awaiting a Labour government. Is austerity a necessity or a choice?

Lammy makes clear that the first round of austerity launched by David Cameron and George Osborne was “a choice and ideological”. As for now, “I don’t see where the savings are coming from. I don’t see the public appetite for the savings. No one was talking about cuts to public spending just a month ago. We’re talking about it as a result of Truss’s budget.”

I don’t believe this entirely answers the question and press him on whether Labour would agree with cuts out of necessity. He seems hesitant and says he can’t speak for shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves. “We haven’t seen the numbers. It’s very hard. You can’t make up fiscal policy on the hoof.”

The point, I argue, is that Labour might inherit such a mess it will spend its first term in office mopping up. Lammy chides me for appearing pessimistic, as he does a few times over the course of our discussion. “Keir said in his party conference speech that we might not be able to do all we want to do in five years. We’ve got to be realistic about that. But I would put this on a bigger canvas. The British Labour Party, one of the most important progressive forces not just in this country but in the world, was in power in the twentieth century for just 23 years. And in those 23 years we delivered the NHS, we delivered the minimum wage, we delivered peace in Ireland, we delivered two race relations acts, we delivered comprehensive schooling.”

Why don’t people talk about him in the same breath as, say, Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting as future leaders? “You’d have to ask them,” he replies dryly

That leads me to ask about the current Labour offering. Now there is such a big polling lead, why does the party need to be so afraid of the right-wing press? Can’t it offer a more radical platform?

Lammy tells me I am talking too much like a pundit at one of those north London dinner parties. “Let me push back with some truths. The first thing is we have been out of power now for twelve years. If we lose the next general election, we will have been out of power potentially for eighteen: an entire generation. It’s a shocking failure of a political party and movement.” He says there is a global trend with centre-left parties. “There’s something about the way we eat ourselves alive, believe our own hype and lose the business to charm, persuade and listen to the electorate.” He thinks the lesson of recent centre-left success in Germany, Australia and the US is to reassure the public with safe policies and normalise a better politics.

I push the point that the public has an appetite for radical change. Lammy asks me for evidence of that. “Is it in the seats that we need to win? Or is it in Lambeth, Haringey and Brighton?” I highlight examples of the public polling to the left of Labour – nationalisation, support for striking workers, our relationship with the EU. It can’t just be about competence, can it?

On this we agree. Lammy says Labour must be radical in office and lists examples such as the party’s prosperity and skills plans – but it comes back to realism. “We certainly are not going to be in power very long if we don’t demonstrate to the public that we will be fiscally responsible.”

The discussion of political agendas takes us to the question of leadership. Why do some politicians seem to rise effortlessly up the ranks, I wonder, while others remain in obscurity? Looking at the Conservative front bench, it demonstrably isn’t predicated on intelligence, communication skills or grasp of policy detail. I ask Lammy how he managed to ascend the party ladder.

For one of the only times in our discussion, he looks lost for words. “Oh God, I don’t know. It’s very hard to have a window on oneself.” He considers for a moment and, tellingly, his answer leads back to empathy – and its emotional neighbour, authenticity. “When I entered politics people warned me that I might lose myself, that I might not recognise myself decades later, that I would lose something of my authenticity, that I would lose my voice.” He suddenly grows more confident. “As I sit here in front of you today, I think I’ve kept my authentic voice. I think I have kept my values. It matters a lot to me that people can say, ‘I know where David Lammy’s coming from, he cares, he believes’ – even if they disagree with me. My integrity in politics matters to me a lot.”

There’s a kind of star quality in Lammy. The way he engages recalls something of Blair or Obama (who’s a personal friend of his). He frequently uses my first name, drops in details that he knows about me, and at one point seems to characterise me as his equal during the Brexit years. (The more banal truth is that he was a leading backbench rebel and I was a political pundit firing off angry missives on Twitter.)

Why don’t people talk about him in the same breath as, say, Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting as future leaders? “You’d have to ask them,” he replies dryly.

I press the point. Does he have further ambitions in the party?

For a second Lammy looks uneasy, but tackles the question head-on. “I think some people have described me as a bit of a survivor. And I believe the best thing you can do is the job you’ve got. I turned down offers to be on the front bench, until I determined that the front bench was somewhere that I wanted to be. I’m always fully focused on what’s in front of me. I don’t think I lack ambition. But I’m hyper-vigilant about running away with myself or letting my ego run ahead.”

Trying my luck, I ask if he will ever run for the top job. “I don’t foresee that.” He jokes that by the time Starmer vacates the leadership Lammy (now 50 years old) may be on the point of retiring.

It is not unreasonable to suspect he might wish to run the party. Having served in junior government posts under both Blair and Brown, he’s one of the few members of Labour’s top team with ministerial experience. In a piece for the Observer after the 2019 election he appeared to hint at a run for leader, but ultimately declined to throw his hat into the ring.

Lammy has shown ambition in other areas of his life. Growing up in Tottenham, at the age of ten he won a choral scholarship to attend the fee-paying King’s School, Peterborough. His academic success subsequently took him to Harvard Law School, after which he was called to the bar. He entered parliament through a by-election for the Tottenham constituency in 2000, after the death of the much-loved Bernie Grant. Aged just 27 at the time, Lammy was for a period Britain’s youngest MP.

Lammy’s background has informed much of his work. In Tribes he writes at great length about engaging with his Guyanese heritage and tracing it back further to West Africa. He is comfortable discussing racial disparity and identity politics. “My politics comes from somewhere,” he tells me. “It comes from my experience of growing up in Tottenham.”
I throw Lammy the question often thrown to me as a Labour supporter – why do the Conservatives seem to be doing so much better than Labour in terms of minority representation in its most senior positions? He replies that under Cameron the Tories worked hard on their diversity agenda and promoted positive discrimination, which is now bearing fruit – and that Labour still has the highest proportion of ethnic minority MPs.

But does he agree with black Conservatives like Kemi Badenoch that Britain is not an institutionally racist country? Unsurprisingly, he declines to say that it is, but doesn’t endorse Badenoch’s position either. “I believe that all old European countries have old colonial baggage. When I was part of the team winning the 2012 Olympics, Britain was communicating something incredibly powerful to the world. That’s the joy of our multiculturalism and our multi-ethnicity. But yes, there have been other much more challenging moments and flashpoints, such as the debate after Black Lives Matter and the episode around the Colston statue in Bristol, and more recently around the shooting of Chris Kaba [the unarmed black man recently killed by a Metropolitan police officer].” He refers to the Casey report showing institutional bias in the Met.

Is the government’s Rwanda policy racist? He won’t bite on that either, but comes close. “I think the Rwanda policy is a shocking policy. It’s a denial of the truths that I thought we had learned coming out of the Second World War, and the modern human rights architecture that came after it.” He says the government is not concerned about the policy even working. “It’s about shoring up the more extreme parts of our country to gain a certain vote for the Conservative Party.”

It strikes me that a major part of the problem is that the government has monopolised the culture war, and in particular the narrative that Britain has nothing much to be ashamed of in its history. For much of Labour’s history, the party unapologetically supported the British Empire. Don’t we have to grapple with our past and be honest about it?

“I think the Rwanda policy is a shocking policy. It’s a denial of the truths that I thought we had learned coming out of the Second World War”

It’s perhaps the most refreshing moment of the interview. “We do have to be able to look backwards in order to tell a story about the future,” he says. “Warts and all. And one of the demands we’re seeing from Generation Z and the millennials is just to know the truth. It’s a commitment to know all of those stories, not just to have history told through the lens of the victor, and I think that it actually makes us stronger to do that.”

He raises another important point: “At a time when authoritarianism and populism are on the rise, getting underneath and being truthful about our past, as painful as it is, becomes very, very important. I think that Britain is a great enough country to stand on our history and to move forward.”

As he speaks, I reflect that this is the kind of reasoning currently absent from much of the mainstream discourse – mainly because its proponents are terrified of being branded unpatriotic. For Labour politicians, in particular, the backlash can prove toxic. Lammy seems to read my mind. “I’m proud of this country. I’m proud to be an MP in this country. I’m prepared to offer a critique of it. Of course, I want to improve it. But it’s from a bedrock, in the end, of being in a country where I feel I belong.”

This leads neatly to Lammy’s foreign policy brief. I ask about his stance on the demand in some Commonwealth countries for slavery reparations. Not unreasonably, he declines to answer directly. “I think that’s a complex issue. I’m very aware that this is a debate in the Caribbean as those countries celebrate 50 years of independence. And for them they feel very strongly that they have lost out on aid and development, particularly as against other parts of the global south – and they confront the fact that slaves became emancipated and the slavers got the money, not the enslaved. It’s a debate we’ve got to listen to.”

This seems indicative of the kind of foreign secretary Lammy would be: thoughtful, knowledgeable and more inclined to listen than lecture. The conversation moves to several different policy areas: Israel and Palestine (he affirms his opposition to moving Britain’s embassy to Jerusalem), China and Taiwan (“we have to lower the temperature”). On the long-term outlook for Ukraine: “Russia has got to be prepared to repair the damage it has done, and I think that clearly Ukrainians will want security guarantees.” He commits both to the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and to multilateral nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. He won’t commit to re-establishing the Department for International Development, which, to widespread opposition both from Labour and many Conservatives, Boris Johnson rolled into the Foreign Office. He insists, however, that development, alongside the climate emergency, will be among his top priorities – multilateral and cooperative, not “old-style philanthropic Victorian”. He asks why the UK did not use its clout and experience to assist Covid vaccine manufacturing in Africa.

Lammy’s fundamental concern is to set a new, constructive course for Britain’s global engagement. “My number one job is to communicate very powerfully that Britain will be back in the mainstream, that Britain is not in the business of tearing up the rule of law, that Britain wants to be engaged in multinational institutions.” He says that the current government’s agenda boils down to “always looking for a trade deal”, and insists that under Labour foreign policy will be based on values and principles above transactions. “The international community is crying out for Britain to be back in a mature, responsible, reliable place that’s consistent, where people know where you’re coming from. At the moment we’ve vacated the room. It’s been very depressing to watch our standing fall.”

Inevitably, the conversation turns to our relationship with the EU. When I ask Lammy if the UK has lost influence as a result of Brexit, he makes it clear he believes our departure was a mistake and notes the forecast of a 4% drop in GDP. He insists we can cooperate closely with the EU and improve relations. But clearly rejoining is off the agenda. The only time I disagree is when he states that Brexit does not necessarily entail a loss of global influence. I strongly agree, on the other hand, when he says that “we need to be suggesting some things ourselves, not just being recipients of ideas coming from the European Union.”

With that, our time is up. Lammy quickly scoops up his papers, locks the office and ushers me through the labyrinthine corridors towards the building’s exit. That is, until we reach the gate. Lammy cannot find the parliamentary card that opens it. For the first time since he greeted me, he looks flustered and starts worrying that he will be late for a community event. Has this ever happened before? I ask helpfully.

He escorts me back to the office, where he hunts the room for the elusive card. It’s not on the desk, or in his wallet, or his bag. I picture us spending the entire evening together and wonder what we’ll talk about. And then I spot something sticking out of the side of his armchair, and triumphantly retrieve it for him. See, you had nothing to worry about, I joke.

Based on the preceding hour, neither do Britain’s allies. As we retrace our footsteps towards the exit and say our goodbyes on Parliament Square, it occurs to me that, for the first time in several years, the UK and its international relationships may soon be in safe hands.

Jonathan Lis is a political journalist and commentator. He has written for publications including the Guardian, Prospect and Washington Post, and regularly broadcasts on television and radio