Quite objectively, the job of foreign secretary is of less and less importance. The department still has an ancient building or two, but it’s a shadow of its former self. Once it led the world. Now it leads the world in rat infestations. It used to despatch gunboats. Now it despatches tweets and statements of ‘deep concern’. It frets about the United Nations. It caves in, falls to the floor so fast you’d think its legs were amputated at the knees, if an international court so much as looks in its direction. It’s a department of cowards, cowards and frauds. Cowards and frauds and losers bred since birth.
It might be considered apt, then, that for most of this century, the foreign secretary has been a man or woman of significantly below average ability — even if you just take as your reference the detritus who fill British cabinets.
Ladies and gentlemen, the foreign secretaries. No personal presence, no intellectual heft, no vision, no grasp of detail, no capacity to maintain the focus of the bureaucracy, no interest in hard problems, an IQ which, if measured, might be below a hundred. We’ve had them all.
The Dominic Cummings school of political nihilism would tell us that the foreign secretary’s job is already done in practice by scheming, weaselly enemies of the people called civil servants. So it does not matter if the foreign secretary himself is stupid, or an empty moralist with nothing to back it up, or stupid and an empty moralist with nothing to back it up in combination — like the one we have now. There’s some truth to this view. And the prime minister has been his own foreign secretary for a long time, making the office somewhat diminished, vestigial, perhaps a kind of phantom limb.
But let’s pretend for just a moment that this great office actually mattered. Let’s pretend — really entering the realms of fantasy, here — that Britain mattered, too. It’s still the old days. The country is not close to extinction. What kind of person ought to be foreign secretary if those things were true? Someone who did not talk without thinking. Someone who combined deep knowledge of some things — including languages that were not English — with an ability to assimilate information fast. Someone whose words were perhaps not often offered, but whose word meant something when you heard it. Not a fool who spoke often, frequently mixing things up in that difficult and painful transition from mind to mouth, like the guy we have now.
David Lammy may not be a stupid man either in raw computational terms or on paper. I believe he is, but let’s leave that aside for a moment.
He may not be a stupid man. You could have fooled me. He behaves like a very stupid man. He talks like a stupid man, acts like a stupid man, holds himself like a stupid man — a stupid man who is very, very chippy about his own stupidity. Someone whose stupidity may not define him as obviously as his wounded vanity does, but for whom stupidity has always been a millstone around the proverbial neck, a public obstacle to be confronted like a physical ailment: a large goitre, perhaps — or a particularly revolting skin condition.
Lammy’s stupidity, his evident ignorance of the actual substance of his job — which is, lest we forget, the world, the whole world — is such a barrier to his successfully fulfilling the duties of office that it’s funny. Watching him talk, even reading prepared remarks, is like watching an old, old women without dentures try to eat toffee. It’s horrific, it’s a warning about human frailty, but it’s also — if it hits you just right — hilarious, bitterly, cruelly hilarious. Every misfired project, every miscalibrated trip, every statement in print or spoken. Hilarious.
There he is — in Bulgaria — with the actor Barry Keoghan — to launch a campaign about children’s social care across the entire world — in the week that a Hamas—Israel ceasefire is announced and it is voted on by the Israeli cabinet. While rockets and drones rain down on Ukraine each night. As the Chinese nuclear programme and its naval building expands precipitously. It’s Peter Sellers. It’s Mr Bean.
At least he isn’t in Moscow, I suppose. At least he isn’t in Beijing, trying vainly to do his job.
It’s like some horrible Disney movie where a dumb animal is tasked with saving the family farm, but without the happy ending. It’s like a Make-a-Wish child on the football field, but the dumb-as-rocks players haven’t been told to go easy on the little guy. It’s like watching someone dancing via camcorder on an episode America’s Funniest Home Videos. They’re smiling, all content, but you know it’s going to end badly. Will they fall into the fireplace? Will they drop their partner? Will a slab of plaster detach from the ceiling and rain down dust on their head? You don’t know, but you know it’s going to happen.
‘Get ready, everybody. He’s about to do something stupid!’
Why is such a man head of what used to be a great department? Why is it he that the foreigners have to accept, have to meet, have to talk to — can you imagine? — if they want to petition the diplomatic apparatus of His Majesty? Someone so lacking, someone so unself-aware as to fail to notice that lack.
Tell yourself it doesn’t matter. We’ve had other foreign secretaries just as bad before. That instead of him, the enemies-of-the-people civil servants, the products of our own despicable, pathological regime, are running the department. That the prime minister is his own foreign secretary. That the job is mostly paperwork and nothing — do it all, if it makes you feel better. Do it all.
It’s still an indictment of our politics. An indictment of the Labour Party. An indictment of cabinet government. It’s astonishing. An example of how the state is content to run massive, constant opportunity costs for no apparent reason. Allow yourself the privilege of noticing that, at least.
True but most importantly very, very funny.