Politics can produce some fickle friends – and none, it seems, are more fickle than the Honourable Member for Tottenham. Watching last night’s debate on Gaza in parliament, Mr S was surprised to watch David Lammy’s reaction to the intervention of his onetime leader. After Jeremy Corbyn rose to his feet, the Shadow Foreign Secretary was seen lying back and shutting his eyes in apparent contempt. What could possibly have been going through his mind?
Was it perhaps the time in June 2015 when Lammy nominated Corbyn to be leader, to ‘broaden’ the debate that year? Or after the magic grandpa’s ‘bloody brilliant’ conference speech in September 2017, following that year’s snap election, which prompted Lammy to claim that Corbyn ‘is heading to No. 10’? Was it even March 2020, when he told the Bernie Grant Trust ‘I so wish Bernie had been alive to see his great friend Jeremy Corbyn become leader of the Labour party’?
Perhaps Lammy was thinking of none of these things. But maybe, given the contempt which he has publicly heaped on Corbyn only after he relinquished the leadership, it ought to have been a quiet moment of reflection on the strategic errors made by the man who now shadows the country’s main diplomatic portfolio.
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