David Lammy: I’ve had imposter syndrome my whole life- until now

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0:41hello and welcome to full disclosure um a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than i would ever get on my radio show and speaking of radio shows david lammy do you miss yours i do james i do and it's sort of strange because people say you know your foreign secretary but the odd person says um you're the lbc guy where did it all go wrong mainly because occasionally i got the pleasure of standing in for you uh which is a much bigger show than my little thing on the weekend um but i do miss it and the thing i miss james which i know that you will understand that a lot of people don't understand is the listening people think it's all about talking and more than anything else it's about listening and i hadn't realized that i had that skill until um becoming an lbc presenter and i i am a better listener by virtue of doing all those stints presenting and i i know that i will go to my grave blessing god for giving me the skill to listen and for this opportunity to listen to these and the intimacy of the folk that follow you and you have the most amazing progressive set of followers so it's a real kind of you know these numbers phone oh you see their names and it's just it's a family so i miss that i miss that beautifully put i miss you too yeah We should begin at the beginning, which is in 1972 in Whittington Hospital in North London.

2:21Both of your parents were Guyanese, very much part of the Windrush generation. Dad arrived first. Did they meet here? No, in a sense, my my my mother was my father's second wife. And it was very much arranged. You know, it was arranged back in the village between my mother's adoptive mother and my father's mother. You know, my father sort of sent, I need a second wife. People said Rose would be good. And that was kind of how it happened. They didn't have the best marriage, to be honest. my my mother was a um quiet um country girl with a hell of a lot of principle and my father was an urbane city guy with a bit less principle a lovely charmer but but but they had a quite a tempestuous marriage to be honest um but yes he'd come here in 1956 he'd fared fairly well he was very popular he had this wonderful knack of friendship and unusually for his generation um friendship well beyond racial stereotype my my father had a lot of white friends uh in the 50s 60s 70s he loved to drink in the pub um so my so our house was not it was it was typically west indian in one sense but not it was slightly bigger uh by sheer virtue of his personality i am i get i often get little moments in my notes when i'm preparing to interview somebody where i think that somebody's wikipedia page has been doctored or that there's some mythology has appeared in the story was he really a taxidermist he was a taxidermist did he bring his work home he was a taxidermist so the story is he wanted to be a pharmacist right um people forget that the wind rush generation yeah they came and they very much built the nhs the nurses they worked on the railways the buses um but they also came on a sort of program of working in different parts of manufacturing and in that era taxidermy was huge it was it was still a big deal you know uh posh folk went out and shot big animals in in kenya

5:04and someone had to stuff them and people you know your cat died and got it stuffed it was a big deal uh and um some of his work is still at the national history museum actually that he and he worked for a big to see it i have seen it yeah i saw it when i was culture minister he worked for the biggest taxidermy company uh at that time um and um roland royce i think it was called and and um he um and that's what he did and we grew up with these animals um quite weird well not weird because it's all you know well it it was it was eclectic it was an eclectic and he he ultimately went into business for himself he wasn't a very good businessman but he had a he had a factory in in in in tottenham um fun enough there's a story because um he rented out some space in the very early days in his factory to a to a young a young lad who was soldering things together and making stuff who uh goes on to be alan sugar and abstrad and all the rest of uh so yeah but but he was attached should have got some equity instead of some rent um was it was it were you comfortably off then as a family you were five children no we weren't because we weren't comfortably off.

6:26I mean, we could have been, but we weren't because Dad had a problem with alcohol. Right. He had a problem with alcohol. He wasn't a good businessman. When do you become aware of that? And indeed of fractures? Well, I guess, you know, I've got elder brothers, but we're now, I guess, into the late 70s, 80s. Taxidermy is waning. Animal rights is becoming big. it's not a good business to be in um i never would have thought of that but of course it's not it is the truth yeah um and of course it's completely faded away really as a skill um but the bottom line is dad is this is this is the 1980s the economy's not great taxidermy's not great he starts to drink um uh i suspect he's got demons you know you don't quite know what in that era men didn't sort of you don't know but things aren't going well for him and as a consequence in a very patriarchal family and my mother was working very hard but not making very much money um you know she worked in london underground for a bit she then worked for harangay council as a housing officer but not making very much money and not very worldly wise he leaves when when i'm when i'm 12 never see him again he goes to america um he doesn't tell us that he's leaving and i remember him you know kissing me on a platform in king's cross and saying take care of your mom and i thought he was coming back and he but i had a feeling he might not and he didn't um so i would say that we then become quite poor and actually you know you talk about i talk sometimes about being working class and social mobility but the truth is uh really i'm raised by a single parent from that point onwards and the truth is if you've got a parent that has addiction issues there's a kind of chaos and a and a um you don't quite know what's coming next is the truth and so there's that sort of dysfunctional element that doesn't matter but That's not about what class you are.

8:42That can be, you can be, you know, you can be terribly posh and have parents who are alcoholic. And it's not, it's not a lot of fun. Drugs or alcohol. It's trust, isn't it? You can't trust the adults. You can't trust the adults. I remember one Christmas, my dad bought me, this is, this, a chopper bike. Now, a chopper bike was a big, big deal. A fantastic kind of braking system in the middle of this bike. um and uh i was so excited he bought it at christmas by new year um he had sold it um to fund his alcohol problem and he said it was nicked and we sort of knew it wasn't nicked he he'd sold it on so that that that's the sort of stuff that stays with you do you think that your mom consciously wanted to get get you out of it because i think a year or two before your dad left she with the help of the parish priest with church being a huge part of your your mum's approach to parenting got got you into into choir school mum and i were a great team i mean i i we were a great team i i so i think my mum um was always very focused on education i think it would be too strong to say she wanted to get me out of it because she just didn't have quite that kind of confidence she had a quiet purpose and that was education but get me out of it would have been a bit stretching but the truth is I wanted to get out of it I had this fierce ambition way beyond what was capable I don't know where the hell it came from but it was there and it so it was a kind of teamwork and i and i also so you didn't know what you wanted but you knew that you wanted more than was available in tottenham it it it wasn't just it was that it it was that in in what i sometimes think is that i tottenham was parochial it wasn't just local it was i didn't really move much beyond the n17 postcode and i and and that was it was small i felt it was small but more than that, I sometimes moved into these places, either with my father, because as I say, he was gregarious, we'd go on trains, we'd go on journeys, he had friends who were way beyond the N17 postcode.

11:18And the truth is that I, but I did see the way that sometimes people patronized my parents. there was a sort of this is the era of alf garnet and you know um you know love thy neighbor um mixed blessings um i mean you know comedians uh really taking the michael out of out of black people black skin it was very very regular and and we were sort of fringe really and i i saw the way that you know sometimes i was in these settings when i think people were patronizing my parents and i thought i don't want that you were sensitive i i was sensitive to that talk to them about it no never god no no no no no no i was just precocious enough to know that that was what was going on i don't and i guess my dad would have known that was going on but you know as as is the case with lots of first generation immigrants wherever they are in the world um they they nod and there's a meekness and they don't make a fuss as they persevere um um and i was sort of acutely aware of that i guess and so you set yourself on on a different course yeah i mean i didn't know the hell i was going to do it i mean i had no idea how it was going to be possible and i sometimes i think i described it in one of my books as a sort of it's a bit like sort of wizard of oz i sort of fell down a rabbit hole and turned up somewhere else um well you've also heard about the fear of prison not not because you were um likely to become a criminal but because i don't know maybe i was as you looked around that that was an avenue that perhaps was better trodden than others yeah so um a close relative of mine ended up in prison um a lot of the older guys in that period in the 70s were ending up in prison and there are tough parts of this country um if you went back in time salford um brixton um you know um parts of belfast for a whole range of reasons

13:42where in certain eras, people did time. You know, they went to prison. And this was a generation in the 70s where a lot of the older black, these guys now are in their 60s, but they're sort of 10, 11, 12 years older than I was, disappeared. I mean, it's like an epidemic. They just disappeared off the streets. And you heard stories of being beaten up badly by the police being framed. But you also knew that there was a lot of criminality, casual, petty criminality, but nevertheless it was criminality. And so prison was this deep fear of being locked up, taken away, out of control. And it did, by my youthful imagination, landed on this.

14:31And it stayed in my head for many, many years. And I guess a trip that I made to a prison, I think it was Maidstone, very, I must have been, you know, 10 or 12, stayed with me. It just stayed with me. And I fixated on it as the way that young people can and determine that that would not be my destiny. did you have much interaction with the police yes um i don't say much because i avoided i avoided the police and wherever that would you know could happen so not i wouldn't say much but i did um and um i remember being i can't now remember how old i was i'm forgetting was i 12 um probably 12 um in those days i had a curly perm oh my god how how sad i must have looked um this was the era of fame everyone had leg warmers and curly perps uh uh and i but i remember being surrounded by i don't know five or six officers um who said i fitted the description of someone who just mugged somebody, who patted me down, I was really, really scared.

16:03And I wet myself on the street. That's how scared I was. I was scared of being on my own with these officers and being patted down. And, you know, was I going to be thrown into the back of a van? And that was that. There's already in your life um an extraordinary duality then isn't that because you've got this chaotic home life difficult community and by dint of your mum's belief that you would become the black alid jones i haven't made that up i met alid jones obviously in the studio here yeah yeah since then um is that you know the sights were set upon upon the king's school in Peterborough because you had you had the voice of an angel yeah apparently I did I did actually and you know that was my mother's faith going to church um a wonderful vicar father Ken wonderful Welsh vicar great socialist by the way um and um a head teacher and wonderful music teacher you know you meet these people um who have a sort of powerful conviction and these are people who had a conviction in that era to the inner city and to working in places like tottenham and i wish you know they're not alive for me now to sort of quiz them on why they had that vocation but i there was quite a few of them that landed on me and they spotted something and they spotted a determination and a sort of that sense that he does he doesn't want to stay here he wants to get somewhere and i'm going to help this kid and i'm so it makes me very emotional thinking about these characters and i i i'm so grateful for for for oh dear i'm getting emotional now um for all that they did really to support me and my ambition because i wouldn't be here if it wasn't for them and that's a recurring motif in your life isn't it the the consciousness of the path not taken the the the but it'd be could i could you talk about escape is that the right word almost from another possible future?

18:12You could talk about escape, but you could just talk about ambition. Yes. And in certain... I'm just tying it into that fear that you felt. Oh, yeah. That kind of... I see. Psychologically. Yeah.

18:27God, it's so complex. Of course it is. There's a deep fear. And if I was being honest, I think there's also... People these days talk about traumas, don't they? Yes. And anxiety. you've already said two or three things that i think would qualify as trauma from a therapeutic so there's that and then there's this sort of self-belief there's the hope there's there's the kind of your uh there's the relational bit where you're you're making friendships with these adults who are trying to support you and get you to a better place and you hold on to them for dear life and it's hopeful and it's exciting and and and it's different some of them live more bohemian lives you know you know you you step into their homes and there are all these books stuff i mean all we had with mills and boons and encyclopedia um so so there's all so it's a it's i always this is not all negative um that there are many upsides but they they they they alongside mum you know i get to peterborough which is a different world which is a new town there's a roy canier in this era is quite a big figure on british tv and is advertising moving to Peterborough and lots of um lots of EastEnders have moved up there and um and it's it's just different it's full of you know Peterborough Cathedral is this awesome building and I you know these days I'm in the House of Commons and I stand up and I do a speech and that's another awesome building but it all starts in Peterborough in many ways I find my voice there and even though it's not easy and it's not easy there's there's racism it's the 80s explicit racism oh god yeah yeah we're almost identical ages and i i didn't remember much from my school i wouldn't because i'd only ever have been an observer of it but i i had lunch recently with a lad who was a few years behind me and he was still very traumatized by the racism he experienced that my school had exactly the same era it was just there and teachers didn't really step in to stop it no and sometimes they too were more explicit about it of course because there was it wasn't I don't know if you found this.

20:43It was an era of hard knocks. Character forming. Character forming. Character forming. That was the view. Yes. So if you could survive that, you live as an adult kind of holding and with a sort of weird, what's that Stockholm syndrome, where you're grateful for the character forming. I mean, it's quite bizarre. but that was part of it and and by the way yeah there was racism but it wasn't there was lots of isms yes there was sexism uh there was classism there was homophobia but everyone gets everyone gets kicked it's not you know if they find something in everything there was still corporal punishment we all got whacked so it wasn't you know uh yeah um that was the era it strikes me there's two interviews here there's the interview of the king's school chorister in peterborough and the interview of the north london school boy growing up in tottenham but of course you're both of them did you switch did you consciously when you'd come home for the holidays or did you consciously switch did you feel yourself changing yeah i mean and and that that uh dichotomy um confusion yes um it's another trauma i i lived with with with for many years and i you know would your voice change am i working class middle class my voice broke late but would your accent change when you oh my axe god yes god yes i was watching a video of me in parliament you know when i first got in there i was so posh i spoke my kids said dad why are you speaking how come you spoke so posh in your late 20s and the truth is i'd practiced i want you know i'd watched you know pygmalion and my fair lady and you know there's you know audrey hepburn's practicing elocution and i i i wanted to be a barrister so i had to lose this north london i I want it to fit in.

22:49And in that sense, there's a part of my nature that wants to, what does want to fit in, wants to go with the seam. And just back to Peterborough. Peterborough is a kind of every town. Yes. It's Middle England. It's the Fens. It's a great way to learn about England. Yes. it's a great place to sort of fit into and by the end of that journey by the time I was 18 I I fitted in I so much so that you became head boy absolutely how proud was your mom oh she was she was my biggest cheerleader so she was very proud and actually I guess in that sort of precocious kind of way where you're if I look back psychologically making her proud propels me for most of my teenage years and well into my 20s well on to becoming an mp just the thrill the joy um the hope and possibility um again of making a very good therapist of making her proud yeah i mean that that's the that's the overriding emotion really so you start almost collecting these achievements first this first that first black this first and it's an addiction i can see that it's an addiction so when did the academics kick in you you because i mean it's all very well being able to sing like an angel but presumably you had to produce the goods academically not only to to thrive at kings but also to become head boy you were there on a scholarship but it was a choral scholarship i mean i think i was precocious i don't think i was terribly bright at 11 really i was i was pretty average um i struggled a bit with concentration okay i had to really practice revision um but you had the ability to practice revision well i did towards the end i sort of worked it out about 15 partly because i thought you know bloody hell if i don't get my gcse's i'm i was the first year of gcse's i don't get to stay here i have to go back i suddenly realized i want to stay the transactional nature of qualification as currency yeah i've got to get these grades and stay in sixth form so you pulled yourself so i pulled my socks up and um yeah so i yeah and it it sort of it started to happen really from the moment i got my gcses i was off right off i didn't look and when did the barrister ambition kick in yeah i mean i i had this thing of wanting to help people i've begun to realize despite everything i was a bit of a bridge builder as a person why do you say despite everything because it makes perfect sense given because i guess you're already a bridge yourself between two very different communities even then i must have had an instinctive feeling but i've learned as i've got older that some people can take these experiences and become bitter yes that was never my personality trait thank god i wasn't neither of my parents actually had that they're not they weren't bitter people or sour people they were both hopeful people who like to laugh in different ways so that wasn't my nature thank god and all of that experience led to this place.

26:25Folk wanted to help me. I reached out to them. I was a bridge builder. And I think I decided that law would be good because I cared about justice questions. This was an era. I was very preoccupied with apartheid. Right. And Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko and what was going on in South Africa. There was a big debate about sanctions and boycotting South Africa and Margaret Thatcher was in power and then the riots were happening over her period and there was a sense of injustice. This was a big it was a time of these big cases the Guildford 4, the Birmingham 6, the Tottenham 3, these big cases of injustice and that started to speak to me and I thought I could be I could be a lawyer arguing on behalf of people.

27:11Well so this is this is a bit of amateur psychology for me then so this is the two Davids there's the Davids with the burning sense of injustice partly because of what you've seen happen to people you grew up with in tottenham and you've seen older members of the generation disappear so that's where the sense the feeling comes from but what school and education gives you is you realize just in time the tools that you might need to do anything about it beautifully put and then into that mix throw some of what i was experiencing the racism i was experiencing peterborough the the at moments uh the but also wonderful pastoral care making friends building bridges um people being really generous to me and so into that mix comes oh this i i can make something of this i don't quite know where it's going but let me land on law why not teaching i did think about teaching i thought about the priesthood did you i thought about acting yeah um so um but for some reason the justice angle and there was a bit of me this goes back to watching my parents being patronized and feeling rather small and parochial there was a bit of me frankly that with the hood and the gown and the sort of power uh it was just too appealing so that that was i think um there was a show on in the in the 70s and early 80s um it's a wonderful show um it used to play at lunch times and i'd go home for lunch sometimes crown court yeah of course self-contained stories but really really theatrical i love this show yes i get that um before we get to soas which is where your a-levels took you your a-level results took you i'm just interested in the the broadwater farm riots unfolding essentially at home when you were away at school it's another sort of moment of dichotomy isn't it massive moment it was it was a moment of oh god fear um um shame um um, uh, Tottenham at that point became totemic, um, in a, in a, in a beyond football.

29:38Um, up until that point, people only thought about Tottenham really when they were thinking about football. Um, and from that point in that era with the prime minister we had at that moment, uh, sadly because PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death, which was a hugely, um, um monumental development in the national life of our country um um it tottenham came to tell it for the wrong reasons and i was from tottenham and everybody knew and everybody knew that that stigma was was was very was very real and very live but behind that story was pain um uh on all sides really yes yeah and then that's before you sort of rise through school to become head boy and it's a fairly effortless journey then to so as back to back to london with with your a levels in your back pocket and your legal training begins in earnest so you've got you've got your eye on the wig now yeah i don't want to give it i always worry about making it sound too it wasn't effortless because I still, I lacked a certain kind of discipline.

30:49I was struggling at that stage with, again, you know, the doubt and self-doubt you have when you grow up without a father. You said something once about worrying about who would teach you how to shave. And I found that very moving. All that, I remember not being able to do a tie. I saw an old teacher of mine, Miss Hartrock, the other day. She reminded me that in the first class that I was in for A-level English, we had chaucer and i tears started rolling down my eyes and i thought why have i chosen english i don't understand this and everyone else in the class does so there were there there were of course no one ever no one else understood it but i was gonna say you know but but basically insecurity coupled with precociousness it's a weird cocktail isn't it but i wouldn't want to lose that insecurity because that stayed with me for many many years and i i have um up until relatively recently had imposter syndrome at nearly every critical stage of my life um and certainly uh on a more personal level at moments in nearly every decade of my life struggled with anxiety so i don't want to it wasn't all plain sailing i mean i don't want to give that impression no i should have said seamless rather okay okay so you moved smoothly but but but while struggling yourself when did you notice that the imposter syndrome had gone in this job are you serious finally it's gone what a moment how incredible finally it's gone and I had no I I I just didn't maybe it's also you know getting into your 50s I had no idea it's just you mean literally foreign secretary not shadow foreign secretary no no no foreign secretary it's always been there it's always been there there's always been a moment at every single stage becoming a parliamentarian yes you know stepping out into Tottenham after the riots.

32:55I had a panic before I stood up and did the Windrush speech. Every single moment, I can look back, getting married, and there's a sort of imposter syndrome. Can you, is this me? Can I do this? Can I carry this off? And I literally, I literally walked into number 10. the prime minister asked me to be foreign secretary i walked into the foreign office and

33:29i'm gonna get emotional again and and it just something just fell off my shoulders i had arrived and there was a powerful sense that i'm the right guy in the right job at the right time to do this and and a certain kind of innate confidence um in my ability to do this that that has carried me through and continues to this day. Is your mum still with us? No, no, she's not. So she didn't see this moment? She didn't see this. No, she saw me become an MP. Yes, I know. But she died back in 2008. And, you know, I would so love her to have been there. I should say to you, actually, James, When I walked up to number 10, I had in my pocket, that morning I woke up and I thought, I'm going to take a photo of my parents.

34:25So I had a photo of my parents just after they'd got married in my pocket. And I walked into number 10. At that stage, Sue Gray was still Keir Starmer's chief of staff. Sue grew up yards away from me in Tottenham.

34:47she grew up in a very working class family. There was mental health in her family. Sue's a bit older than me, but I sort of remember Sue, literally living on Phillip Lane in the bottom of our road. I remember her. I remember her walking past. She always looked so, she carried the world on her shoulders and she was very purposeful. And we both had a hug and a little cry because we both knew at that stage, my God, we've come a long way from our background. you know in the Irish community in the West Indian community very close very very close it was the first achieve it was getting into parliament that prompted you to try to track your dad down I think and and getting hold of him in Texas and and he tracked me down right okay uh I guess I I could be found because you had appeared above yeah yeah I'd appeared above the parapet I think he was very proud I know he was very proud he tracked me down we had spoken on the phone he actually tracked me down when i was at harvard and that was a big decision he in 2003 it was during the iraq war we got word that he was dying badly of throat cancer um and he was effectively a pauper by then um and i chose not to go and see him um you know i'd grown up without him i decided that for my own well-being i this was not going to be a good idea um i did go after he died and and and i got him a headstone um and i you know told him i forgived him at his graveside because i did it's you know i absolutely um um and i got a sense that he died quite broken yeah um but um i chose not to go and i was you know i was worried that that would haunt me but it was the right decision good why america why did you set your sights on i mean harvard is fairly hard to say no to but you do have to apply for it in the first place so what made you decide that your future positive that bit of your future lay on the other side there's a part of the story that is the united states that's incredibly hopeful where everything is possible um um there was a glitzy show on tv at the time called la law there was a very very very blair underwood you've got it right and i thought i want to be him um he had a much better curly perm than i had and and so that was how it came about and um and i sort of applied for this thing that i didn't really understand and very strangely um months later the application came back and said you've got in and also at the time in in in a kind of very british way there were some kids taking the British Inns of Court School of Law to court black kids saying that they're failing black kids left, right and centre and it's all subjective and it's racism and this, that next thing.

37:58They were a bit older than me and I thought, my God, I've got to have a plan B. So it was really a plan B. But a plan B that sort of, I did the Inns of Court School of Law, I got through it, but then I, the Harvard application came back and I thought, well, I've got to go. So that's how it came about. But I guess also, James, and you will have, you've interviewed lots of people, lots of African-Americans and Brits. There is a familiar story, isn't there, of the minority leaving Europe and going to the States and kind of getting a kind of... So in America, I found a black middle class at Harvard.

38:42Wow, this was like, you know, this was different. because i know i mean speaking of television programs the hoxtables the cosby show we love that show and all that it meant so there was this whole possibility and this whole thing and this whole network there was there was something i had to touch you're right uh that was a long way from tottenham or peterborough and do it for myself and i i i did not find myself because that would be way too strong but i found some things that were very different and the truth is i came back from harvard and working in the states with a huge ego why did you come back oh i missed home was it that simple massively i missed i missed walker's crisp i missed tea i missed rabina i missed extenders i missed everything about home is at california i was working in california it was great but it wasn't it wasn't the uk and i you know the truth is my i am i we talked about this before james i think i'm i am very english i'm very bloody english uh i mean that's what i am and i missed home uh so that's why i came back and i'm grateful that i came back but but america gave me a confidence harvard gave me a confidence um uh that propelled me into the house of commons and that moment is a moment where i look back and i still can't quite reconcile the confidence i must have had at 26 27 to run for tottenham with the guy i am now because that i that was the most unbelievable thing i could have done a little bit of if you can make it there you can make it anywhere then you came home with maybe perhaps that wouldn't have developed in quite the same way or at quite the same speed if you'd stayed here for the early years of your legal career the earliest years of your league yes i think it would have gone yes i think that's probably right i think i think that's probably right so where did the political impulse start when did that kick in well i talked about justice and social justice being a big theme um law being the the the thing that i'd connected to but politics being there very strongly being very argumentative having lots of rows uh with tories great friend of mine at school james adams um was a big tory james sadly that's another story was was was killed on the london bombings actually um but but i had so i was very argumentative and um and i i guess i moved i did what that what what what sometimes happens with lawyers you you go from visiting someone in a police cell to asking bigger questions about why they're in the police cell or representing a small business that's gone bankrupt about why has it gone bankrupt and you go from you go to policy um and i've always been very interested in policy and politics I am you know I'm a labor man but I wouldn't say I was a um a labor animal you know I'm I've got a politics that's pragmatic I can find common cause and a means to an end rather than an end in itself you've got it you've got it which puts me in the um not the biggest majority well no I was going to say the sort of moderate wing right yes of course um yeah there are lots of you actually um and again you're there are lots of nice milestones when you get into parliament as well i mean but both statistical ones but also achievement ones when you seconded the queen's speech um i think you announced you announced your arrival really with that didn't you on the parliamentary stage certainly caught tony blair's eye yeah yeah i i i forgot about that well there's a you know if you know me well and i know you a little bit james so you're not that different in a way um uh the ability on a big stage to perform yeah um but actually privately capable of being quite quite shy and one lives with that but you i mean you you clearly have the right stuff i mean we're now in the period of your life where where people are aware of you and will know some if not all of what you did.

43:14What are the moments for you? I mean, there were tuition fees, you were particularly interested as you achieve ministerial office. Going back to what you said about the Inns of Court and other black students challenging the status quo there, you had a look at how many black teenagers were getting into Oxford colleges and things like that. I mean, was there a uniting force? Was there a theme to your politics? Or were you collecting causes based on authenticity and interest yeah i've i've always uh reached for a certain authenticity in the way that i've chosen to do my politics politics can make you desperately cynical but i think i've still got an hopefulness and an optimism my i would say that my career is in in is in thirds and i'm now in the in the in the third act the first act is under blair a junior minister under blair and brown uh i'm very proud of when I was a health minister of something called the Diabetes National Service Framework.

44:20You know, at that stage, people still had their limbs cut off when they got diabetes. And it's a illness that plagues a lot of black people. And I put in the first system to really grip that and deal with that. Four hour waits in A &E were mine. I was a junior minister that delivered that. Tony asked me to move to culture and to lead the commemoration on the abolition of the slave trade. and then on higher education i started this and i got a lot of stick for at the time this big debate about who gets to go to oxford and cambridge you might remember and uh challenge them on the amount of kids from poor working class backgrounds in the north or black browns backgrounds in tottenham that weren't getting to go that's changed uh in it's really david cameron picked that up when he came into office actually but that that has changed a lot But in that period, I did a lot on fair access.

45:09And then the second stage is really as a backbencher where I find my voice in Parliament. It starts with the riots. 2011. Most definitely. You've got Windrush. You've got Grenfell. You've got Brexit and the second referendum campaign. So you had no problem whatsoever processing being in opposition in anything? You relished it more because of the freedom? everybody said opposition's terrible you can't make anything happen you can't change anything david cameron asked me to lead the lammy review yes i actually found i had a lot of power as long as you've got your voice and you know how to use it and i and i somehow did and then at this stage you then become sort of this elder statesman and you've got portfolios i'm now senior within the Labour Party.

46:00I co-chair Keir's campaign to lead the Labour Party and help my mate become the leader. And so I'm now in this arc of obviously governing foreign policy at a very tough time. That's the sort of journey. Those are the sort of three acts, I think. There could be four. Maybe there could be four.

46:25how do you deal with especially with a young family how do you deal with some of the nastier um behaviors of people in the media and public discourse public discourse has got a shed loads worse worse than ever worse worse than the 1980s oh well maybe i mean yeah feels that way to me because i'm not in the personalized people seem to lose touch with the fact that you've got children social media has made it wicked and nasty uh such that you can't read it and if you've got anything like anxiety it will feed it um you worry about your children a lot um i'm lucky i'm a london mp i'm at home every morning at home every evening other than when i'm abroad in this particular role but but but as an mp my kids are very proximate to me they matter hugely to me because i'm you know i didn't grow up without a father um i um in a way as a as a human being i would say that i have found my working life that purpose of my life um a lot easier than the personal side of my life you know being a father um being a partner um um that's the stuff i've had to work at hard i suppose in a way there are manuals or at least precedents for being foreign secretary but the personal stuff is you have to learn it as you go along yeah particularly if you come from a dysfunctional broken family you have to learn it really work at it um so you clearly enjoy being foreign secretary how frustrated have you been by the things that you can't do and most obviously with with reference to gaza and um the the difference between being in opposition and being in power i'm sitting here two and a half years into that war and feeling incredibly

48:28just i i think the suffering it's unimaginable that we're still here that it's still going on that I have not been able to stop this by sheer force of sort of character. But I guess I do know that if you're the German foreign minister, the French foreign minister, the Japanese foreign minister, the Qatari, the Saudi Arabian, we all feel the same.

48:56And you sort of plug away day after day and eventually it will come to an end. But you just don't know the day in which it will come to an end. and then you also recognise that there's a war in Ukraine, there's a war in Sudan. I am doing this job at a time of immense conflict,

49:19but the UK, the world wanted the UK back. It wanted us present. It wants us here. It wants us playing that role. Because we cut ourselves off in 2016, and then again in 2019. We did. we did and you were working on this as a shadow by the way there are elements not quite i wouldn't say in ukraine but there are elements where that period of cutting ourself off it has been a bit of you know i've been returning to the table yes um and and sometimes when you're returning to the table people are not you know the world's changed a bit since we're in the table there are a lot of middle powers countries like turkey india the gulf these are much bigger players today than when i started in politics 25 years ago and of course some of the colonial deference has disappeared now as well that's we're in a post-colonial world but we weren't when you started in politics there were still vestiges yeah absolutely you earn your spurs at the table it's interesting um and you have to sort of there's a phrase what's the phrase um um the wisdom of the of a snake the calm of a dove i mean i don't you know you you you have to be pretty you have to have your wits about you and your skills in place so um as you sort of struggle with the tension between what you can do and what you you can't do how do you decide whether you've done a good day's work or not oh god look let's be clear i wanted to connect britain again i am genuinely if someone had said we'd have done what we've achieved just in a year um really built back those bridges in europe um you know a new deal with the EU, Ireland, Germany, France, that low moment in the Oval Office between Donald Trump and President Zelensky.

51:26The day before, we had a high moment with Keir Starmer and Donald Trump, then that low moment. And then where did Zelensky come the next day? He walked up number 10. We all breathed a sigh of relief. There was Keir Starmer, a warm embrace in Britain, back where it should be so proud of that proud of the trade deal with india a new approach to africa uh things like gibraltar you know problems that we've got we got through it we have done a lot ukraine is still in the fight um yeah we haven't cracked israel gaza but we have got we've got we've got medical aid into Garzans um well when people say you could have done this and you could have done that whether it's the F-35 jets jet parts or I mean there are many people who will never be satisfied understandably as long as Garzans are still being killed but what I mean is there something you wish that was feasible to do which you haven't been able to do the most important underlying question that people ask me, and I think they're absolutely legitimate to ask me and push me on this, is we can't be complicit.

52:42That's what they say. And I am reassured that the decision I took in September not to send our arms because I felt there was a clear risk of a breach of international humanitarian law means that we're not complicit um um now then people say but you are still exporting stuff to israel and yeah we do send things you know if a university wants some chemicals that are on the export licensing or some journalists want some body armor um or ngos we do still send that but we're not sending anything that the idf could use to be used in gaza we're not actually sending direct parts to israel that could be used in an f-35 but there is this global pull on the f-35 that we do put into um and so we can't guarantee that something does not end up in israel without pulling out of that pool without pulling out of that pool altogether and people say pull out the pool yeah but they don't do they really mean are they really saying we should ground um important uh aircraft that's used to keep europe Europe's safe should we really turn around and tell the Baltics look sorry you're on your own with Putin I don't think I don't think they really mean that so we've done all that we can do to make sure we're not complicit and I'm satisfied with that but I want to bring the war to an end and and of course I wake up every day doing all I can to not just on my own but with partners to bring this war to an end and to end on the fourth act the possible fourth act I suspect you've been asked since you arrived in parliament whether you were going to be or whether you wanted to be britain's first black prime minister it's a rhetorical question there is it do you still think of it occasionally you know i i always feel i let people down with my answer because they ask that not really about me but hopeful about about a certain kind of possibility um in britain i see keir starmer get up every day he's a friend of mine uh his work rate is phenomenal he moves from from policy area to policy area.

54:52He's doing the job at the toughest of time, particularly for our economy. And do I think I'd like your job? No, I don't. No, I don't. That's 50%. I just don't. 50 % David Lammy answer, 50 % politician. I'll take that. I don't. David Lammy, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, James.

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