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David Lammy has spoken of his friendship with the US vice-president, JD Vance, as the pair can relate over their “dysfunctional” working-class childhoods.
In a series of interviews with the Guardian, conducted over several weeks, the foreign secretary opened up about a “wonderful hour and a half” spent with Vance over drinks at the US embassy in Italy in May alongside the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner.
Lammy said he had been to mass at Vance’s home and counted him as a “friend”, saying the vice-president “relates” to him over their shared background.
“I remember being at the inauguration of the new pope in Rome with Angela Rayner and JD Vance,” he said: “I don’t think JD and Angela will mind me saying that they were having a couple of drinks … I really wanted a glass [of rosé] but instead I had a Diet Coke.”
The foreign secretary said they were all “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”.
“I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela. So it was a wonderful hour and a half,” he said.
In his interview, Lammy spoke of feeling guilty over the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s, highly awkward first meeting with Donald Trump and Vance in the Oval Office, where the men berated him over the war.
“If I’m being honest, I felt, arrghhh!” Lammy said. “Why hadn’t I done more to support our Ukrainian colleagues in preparation for their meeting?… I was being a bit hard on myself. But I still felt guilty.”
The foreign secretary also touched on his discomfort over Keir Starmer’s “island of strangers” speech about immigration, which drew criticism that the prime minister was echoing the rightwing politician Enoch Powell.
“I think the use of language was poor,” he says. “Poor choice. And if someone had shown me the speech, I would’ve said, ‘Take that out’.”
On the subject of Gaza, Lammy spoke of his “days of deep frustration, deep sadness” over the war with Israel. He said things were “desperate for people on the ground, desperate for the hostages in Gaza”, that the world was “desperate for a ceasefire, for the suffering to come to an end”.
He also said he “100 per cent” wanted to go to Gaza “as soon as I can get in”. Speaking before the government decided to move on to a path to recognise Palestine as an independent state, the foreign secretary described it as a “card you can only play once”.
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In the interview, the Lammy looked back over his career and his difficult childhood, including the effect of his father – an alcoholic who was violent towards his mother, and who left for the US.
“My father didn’t come back. Psychologically that is devastating. There must have been a bit of me that blamed myself. I question whether he did, in fact, love me.”
His father later died of throat cancer without his son seeing him again. Lammy said he could not emotionally handle the idea of it at the time, but added: “I’m quite a forgiving person, my nature is wanting to build bridges, to reach out. It’s why I think I’m not bad at this role.”
He described his sense of purpose as foreign secretary, saying: “This is the first time in my life where I do not have impostor syndrome. I genuinely have a sense of being in the right place at the right time for this job.”
