The day started badly for David Lammy. Well – we don’t know that for sure – it’s feasible that first thing this morning he won a great victory over his toothpaste tube, however his appearance on the Today programme wasn’t exactly a triumph. Asked by Justin Webb whether the US action was legal he told him that ‘we weren’t involved’. That’s the spirit: answer the question you want, not the question you were asked.
The Sage of Tottenham continued to manifest his dream interview rather than the one that was actually going on. We had a rather fun segue into the periodic table and percentages of uranium enrichment. ‘Oh Justin’, said Lammy at one point, ‘we’ve always been clear’. As a rainy day in Dundee.
Lammy continued his grand clarity tour in parliament where he made a statement on the state of the Middle East. It was hardly a great moment in the history of British foreign policy. Essentially, he told the House that there was almost nothing that Britain could or would do. ‘We will continue to persist with diplomacy’, was his repeated statement. As if this were some sort of active choice rather than the inevitable result of declining power. Imagine the equivalent statement in the natural world: ‘we will continue to persist with this tidal drift’, proclaims plankton.
At the end of Lammy’s clarity extravaganza, not much was announced
Once upon a time the foreign secretary would come to the House of Commons to tell them that Britain had sent gunboats to sort out a recalcitrant country: nowadays he comes to announce that ‘we’ve opened an email portal’. Next to Lammy sat Hamish Falconer, whose nepotistic rise in the contemporary Labour party makes the thousand-year Iranian Shahdom look like an exercise in raw meritocracy.
The government benches tut-tutted when Sarah Pochin of Reform UK asked whether the Americans had felt unable to launch their attacks from the Diego Garcia base, owing to the terms of the Chagos surrender deal. ‘Dear, dear’ harrumphed one back-bencher.
At that precise moment, Stephen Doughty, a flustered junior minister, was umming and ahhing before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about whether the Mauritian taxpayer’s bonza payout was being funded from the UK defence budget. Stuttering commenced. Today’s mediocrity war was being waged on many fronts.
‘The Honourable Lady has got to get off social media,’ oiled the Foreign Secretary, accusing Pochin of ‘swallowing conspiracy theories’. ‘Answer the question!’ bellowed Richard Tice. A valiant effort but he might as well have been screaming at a lump of plasticine.
At the end of Lammy’s clarity extravaganza, not much was announced, even less concretely achieved. Britain’s foreign policy continues to look depressingly like a bald man giving his opinion on the design of a comb.
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