There are moments in history when the House of Commons truly becomes the debating chamber of the nation, when members transform into tribunes of the people, speaking for the nation with transcendent eloquence. And there are moments when everyone contorts themselves to avoid saying what they mean. Take a guess which one Monday was.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, had come along to make a statement on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (or Ukraine’s invasion of Russia, if you’re reading this in the United States). He spoke with his most serious, sonorous voice, weighted with the burdens of great responsibility, if not great power. It was, he said, a “brutal, illegal, unprovoked invasion”. He praised the defenders, and denounced Vladimir Putin as “a KGB agent who operates by deception”. And yet his speech was weirdly evasive, as was Priti Patel’s reply. It was as though there was a great orange baby in the room, and no one wanted to mention it.
It takes some skill to speak for 10 minutes on recent events in Ukraine while barely mentioning Donald Trump, but Lammy managed it. It takes even more to praise the US president’s position while stating your own, diametrically opposed, view, but the foreign secretary made a pretty good fist of that, too. Someone relying solely on his speech for an assessment of the international situation would have concluded that Britain, America and Ukraine are marching in lockstep in the search for lasting peace. They would have been quite surprised to learn that at that very moment, at the United Nations in New York, the USA was voting alongside Russia and North Korea against a motion condemning the invasion.
When Lammy rose to speak, Reform vanished faster than a Russian infantryman who thinks he’s heard a drone
“Like us,” Lammy told the chamber, “the US wants to see a sovereign, prosperous Ukraine.” Well, not exactly like us, unless Britain is also wandering round Kyiv and pointing at things it plans to steal.
Everyone knew why he was talking like this, of course. Lammy and Keir Starmer are off to see Trump on Thursday, and believe their only hope of talking him round from his current Putin fandom is transparent flattery in quantities not seen since King Lear last assembled his daughters. So Lammy emphasised, again and again, the deep reasonableness of the few things Trump has said that he agrees with, and completely ignored the other bits.
You might have expected this to provoke mockery or denunciation from the opposition benches, but there was surprisingly little of it. Even those who did attack Trump made it clear that they knew Lammy couldn’t publicly agree with them. Indeed, it took 22 minutes before anyone explicitly criticised the man who has spent the last week doing his best to sell the Ukrainians out and steal their country from under them. Even then, Lammy’s reply turned the blandness up to 11. “We share President Trump’s desire to bring this barbaric war to an end,” he said. “President Trump agrees with us that it’s important that Ukraine is at the table.” Though not enough to actually invite them to the peace talks he’s convened, he didn’t add.
Lammy wasn’t the only person who sounded like he’d lost touch with reality. Jeremy Hunt rose to say that if the government could just get the welfare bill back to 2019 levels, it would save £40 billion pounds a year. We all tried to remember who had been in government between 2019 and quite recently, who indeed had been Chancellor of the Exchequer for quite a lot of that time, but the mind was blank.
In a way it was straightforward for Lammy: everyone present knew what he really thought, and understood why he couldn’t say it. More interesting was the absence of anyone from Reform. Obviously Nigel Farage wasn’t there: the Commons can barely afford to pay him enough to turn up once a week. But Richard Tice and Lee Anderson had both been in the chamber. When Lammy rose to speak they vanished faster than a Russian infantryman who thinks he’s heard a drone. Such courage.
It fell to Desmond Swayne to acknowledge how much things have changed in recent days, with a joke. For weeks Conservatives have attacked Lammy and other Labour ministers for disobliging things they said about Trump in the past. Now Swayne asked if Lammy regretted “recanting the original views that he expressed.” He urged the foreign secretary to follow the example of Archbishop Cramner, who, on being burned at the stake, thrust the hand that had signed his recantation into the fire first.
Lammy’s response was a long “Errrrrrrr.” He doesn’t need to wait to be burned at the stake. He’s already suffering every day.
