LONDON (AFP) – British Foreign Secretary David Lammy yesterday praised Donald Trump as warm and friendly with “incredible grace” and in no way a “warmonger”, in marked contrast to past scathing comments.
In 2018 Lammy, who was then in opposition, called Trump a “woman-hating, sociopath” and a “tyrant in a toupee” while other senior Labour Party figures were also highly undiplomatic.
Britain’s new Labour government, elected in July, has spent months trying to build bridges with Trump’s team and Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Lammy dined with Trump in September.
Ahead of Trump’s swearing in as United States (US) president, Lammy pressed on with the charm offensive.
“Two things that I took away from my extended dinner with Donald Trump in September – this is not a man who, in any sense, is a warmonger,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme.
“I really had a powerful sense that, in reckoning with the world’s most malign interests, he was very clear that he wanted to be strong and powerful, but he’s not embracing war,” he said. Many of those who supported Trump, including many “worried about authoritarian actors, actually quite like the fact that Donald Trump keeps them guessing, and we have to reckon with the fact that 77 million Americans voted for him,” he said.
Asked if he was going through some revisionism himself in relation to his own view of the US president-elect, Lammy said his approach was “progressive realism”.
“In this role, I’ve said that the approach has got to be progressive realism, and that is that you meet the world as it is, not as you would wish it.” “The Donald Trump I met … had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very funny, very, very, very friendly, very warm, I have to say, about the United Kingdom, our royal family, Scotland,” he added.
Other senior Labour figures who have been less than complimentary about Trump in the past include Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner who in 2021 said she was “so happy to see the back of Donald Trump”.
