'David Lammy: Obama's pal' - Times Article by Damian Whitworth

The article below originally appeared in the Times.

If Barack Obama is elected President of the USA, David Lammy will become Britain’s best-connected politician. The two men have much in common beyond race: Harvard Law School alumni, both were raised by single mothers, have a strong faith and share an ability to straddle vastly different worlds. Damian Whitworth meets a man on a mission

Shortly after he emerged on to the political scene at the beginning of this decade as the youngest MP in the House of Commons, David Lammy, now 36, was dubbed “the black Blair”. Then, perhaps because he didn’t rise through the government ranks quite as fast as some had wildly predicted, or simply because this was a trite epithet, it fell out of use. In recent months, he has been nicknamed, equally glibly, “the British Obama”. When he is the only black male member of the Government, says a friend, to call him this is “demeaning”.

Nevertheless, Lammy and Barack Obama share more than their skin colour. In a few weeks’ time, Lammy could be the best-connected politician in Britain, thanks to a friendship with the Democratic candidate that predates his run for the presidency. Both have compelling personal stories and have made unlikely journeys to political prominence. Raised by single mothers, they thrived in academic environments and developed a strong religious faith and sense of morality that informs their outlook. Although they operate in different political cultures, they articulate vividly some common messages about inclusion in a way that seeks to transcend race.

Lammy, who was promoted in the recent reshuffle to Minister of State for Higher Education and to the Privy Council, met Obama in 2005 at an event for black alumni of Harvard. “I saw him every time I went back to the States. We stayed in touch. We had a lot to talk about, a lot in common. He was a senator in the biggest democracy in the world, I was a minister in one of the biggest democracies. Our cultural backgrounds were similar. We built up a professional friendship.”

Listening to Lammy talk, one can almost hear him and Obama shooting the breeze, late into the night after those alumni dinners. Like his friend, he has the lawyer’s ability to deconstruct an argument, the professor’s love of sending new ideas up the flagpole and the pastor’s ability to convey his arguments with passion and eloquence. He is a heavy man, with a slightly lumbering gait (he jokes at one point that he has to go to the gym because he would “love to eat cheesecake all day, and then I’d look more and more like Forest Whitaker”), but his verbal delivery can be as quick and punchy as a blow from a heavyweight boxer.

He is cagey when talking about Obama. Gordon Brown was forced to deny breaking the convention of foreign governments remaining neutral in the presidential race after he wrote an article praising Obama that failed to mention John McCain. “I’m reluctant to talk about personal conversations,” says Lammy. “What I would say is there is a shared experience that’s wider than just David Lammy and Barack Obama. We met at a black-alumni event where there’s a shared experience of coping at the top of your game, of being a minority, and also perhaps an element of trust. I think Barack and I have struck up a mutual respect and trust.

“Of course, what is happening with the Democrats in America is exciting.” He reels off a list of prominent black political leaders he knows. “Obviously, with those politicians, with that dimension of black heritage, it’s particularly interesting for me because I haven’t had role models in Britain in that context.” He attended the Democratic convention – “It was wonderful, really wonderful” – but adds: “I’m slightly constrained here. I have to accept that I’m a minister in the Government. Ask me in November.”

The common version of the David Lammy story is “boy from the ’hood makes good” – but it is more complicated than that. Born to first-generation Guyanese immigrants, he is the youngest of four boys and has a younger sister. He visits relatives in Guyana every year and sends money back. (“They haven’t got shoes. They live in shacks.”) In Tottenham, his family lived in a terraced house on the periphery of the Broadwater Farm estate, which became famous after the riots in 1985 that led to the death of PC Keith Blakelock.

His father left when he was 11. “He went to America. I never saw him again. There was no time to get bitter or upset. My father was a good man, but crumpled under the pressure of fatherhood and responsibility. I don’t judge him for that. I got on with it and had a very strong sense that we mustn’t go under as a family. My older brother came to parents’ evenings with my mum.” He used to speak to his father on the phone occasionally, but there was no inclination on either side to meet before his recent death.

His mother, Rose, also died earlier this year. “It was a tough time for all of us. We were very good friends. She worked very hard.” His mother juggled jobs, including one at Camden Town Tube station and one as a home help, and “was an ambitious woman for herself and her children. Education was incredibly important to her. We spent hours in WH Smith buying rulers, protractors, compasses, comprehension books? She would set tests and go out to work in the evening and come back and expect the test to be done. She was pretty strict. This was in the days before the smacking ban.”

Church was important, too, and young Lammy was in the choir. This led to what he calls his “Billy Elliot moment”: winning a scholarship to the King’s School, a state school in Peterborough that provides choristers for the cathedral choir. “That was a huge watershed for me.” Before then, he says, he could count the times he went further from Tottenham than Holloway. Peterborough “felt very far away. It was far away emotionally.” He was stunned by what he found. “Commentators have taken the mickey out of Peterborough, but I thought it was beautiful, and the school had fields. I hadn’t really been exposed to fields.”

He was the first black chorister at the school and suffered racist bullying. “Some of the kids used to scratch the golliwog off the Robertson’s jam jars and put my name on it. It wasn’t easy. But I made some wonderful friends, friends I still have. It was a Christian, very pastoral environment.”

Trevor Elliott, deputy head of the school, recalls that “David really struggled” with the demands of being a chorister and a highly academic workload. He was a late developer whose A-level results “didn’t suggest he would go to Harvard and be a government minister”. But he was “a delightful and engaging young man” who was made head boy – “His leadership ability was burgeoning, rather than the finished article.” Lammy says that school awakened his interest in politics and social issues, starting with: “Why do some kids get this and others get something completely different?”

He studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, was called to the Bar, then worked in America and spent a year at Harvard Law School. “I had to make an odyssey to a country with a history deeply immersed in race.” He returned and won a seat on the Greater London Assembly. In 2000, he won Tottenham in a by-election, after the death of Bernie Grant.

He has had a number of junior ministerial jobs, most recently Skills Minister. Did he expect to be in the Cabinet by now? “No.” He has also been a member of the General Synod and sat on the Archbishops’ Council. A couple of shaky early performances in the Commons prompted suggestions that he had been brought into the Government too early. This may explain why it took until this month for him to gain a senior job.

The way opportunities open up once a young person’s horizons are expanded is at the heart of his political thinking. Ask him if he knows what would have happened if he had stayed in Tottenham and he laughs mirthlessly. “Of course I do! I know what would have happened: not very much. I am acutely aware of contemporaries left behind. As quite a precocious child, I would have gone off the rails, because there would have been no outlet.” Before he went to Peterborough, his ambition was “not to go to prison”.

He recently visited Feltham Young Offender Institution. “The reason why some of them are caught up in hustling and making money is because they are quite bright, quite entrepreneurial.

They are motivated, but it’s not being channelled. If you don’t have aspiration, the temptation is to go out and do a drugs deal. To what extent do these young men encounter anything beyond the very parochial?” He talks about “encounter culture” – broadening the horizons of young people to make them more aspirational and less vulnerable to the lure of gang culture. “It’s important to experience the diversity of Britain – and I’m not talking about ethnic diversity, but the range of culture.”

On a trip to a Honda plant in Slough, he becomes interested when talk turns to apprentices gathering from all over the country to learn together. Another day, we visit StreetVibes, a project in South London where pupils who have been excluded from school appear to be enthusiastic about the opportunity to record music. Depressingly, they also claim that if they strayed from their neighbourhood to Peckham they would get killed. When talking about the rapper Giggs, Lammy asks, “He’s from round here, isn’t he?” One of the teenagers, as if talking about another world, responds: “No! He’s from Peckham.”

Lammy thinks there should be some sort of national civic service, undertaken by teenagers, that will allow them to “encounter one another, engage in some sort of service beyond their own community”. But, he adds, “Let me make absolutely clear: it’s not just the responsibility of the state; it starts with families and parents.” And, as far as violent young offenders are concerned, themselves. “However tough it is, there is no excuse to take a life. I’m afraid you have to be strong and show self-control. You can’t have everything today. The ability to delay gratification, to understand that, from a bit of effort, tomorrow or next week or next month or next year, something will come, is crucial. That it is more productive to work hard for a week to get 200 quid than to do a drugs deal and get it now.”

As one of very few black MPs, he finds that, “There is a constituency beyond your geographical constituency whether you like it or not, and I am comfortable with that.” He is not shy about talking tough to this constituency. “If 59 per cent of black children are being born into single-parent homes, you are starting off with a host of problems. Some of the presumptions in some parts of the black community have to be challenged – this ‘baby father’ idea, that you can have children with whomever you want with no responsibility at all. That’s unacceptable. It’s degrading to women, degrading to family. We have to make clear that it’s unacceptable, and empower women to say: ‘That’s not the choice for me. I’m worth more than that.’ You have to challenge those men and say: ‘It has catastrophic consequences for you and the community.’”

At a meeting of the From Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, a charity working with disaffected young black boys, he tells his audience: “We need to challenge stereotypes. We need to emphasise the positive. We can turn around this narrative.” He adds: “This is not about poverty. Let’s not say it is. It’s about poverty of aspiration.”

Lammy is married to Nicola Green, a portraitist, and they have two young sons, Joshua, two and a half, and six-month-old Theo. “My kids are mixed race,” he tells the meeting. “As we have seen with my friend Barack Obama, the world sees them as black. And I’m worried what the future holds for my boys. A friend of mine said the best thing you can do for your boys is go to work and then come home and be with your wife. I didn’t have that as a boy.”

While he accepts the need to speak about black issues, he wants his message to resonate to a wider audience. “I’m with Arthur Miller: they are all our sons, they are all our children. Young people need role models. And it’s not just about black role models. A lot of my role models weren’t black – my local priest was not black, my head teacher wasn’t black.”

When I mention that Obama’s appeal has transcended race, Lammy says: “I hope I have as well. I am informed as much by Peterborough – by Middle England – and Tottenham and Harvard and the House of Commons. I have always been a person who bridges different worlds. I find myself in situations with angry young men – white boys on an estate in the North of England or Kent with the potential to be seduced by the extremism of the BNP. Black boys being seduced by the extremism of violent knife crime. Or angry Muslim boys being seduced by the extreme version of their religion. I know what it is like to be young and angry. There’s a phase for most teenagers when they are a bit angry and down on the world. Young people are motivated. It was ever thus. It’s just a case of what it is they are motivated to do.”

What are Lammy’s own motivations? “I could have been a lawyer, but I wanted to be changing the environment in which the laws are practised, pulling the ultimate lever. And my experience in Government tells me that, if I wasn’t around the table, I am not sure that the sort of perspective I bring to bear would always be heard.”

David Miliband used to deflect questions about his own leadership aspirations by saying that the baton would be passed to the “Lammy generation”. The two are good friends, but, says Lammy, “I will support whomever is Prime Minister. I am viscerally loyal.” Is he convinced Brown will be Prime Minister come the next election? “Yeah, because I’m not persuaded that a change of leader is going to be the decisive thing that alters our fortunes, not from where I’m sitting as I speak to you.” When I point out that he appears to have left himself some wiggle room in that answer, he just smiles.

Stephen Timms, Financial Secretary at the Treasury and Labour’s Vice Chair for Faith Groups, says his friend’s personal story is one that “people can understand and warm to – a very credible attribute for a politician”. He notes that the past three Labour Party leaders have had Christian faith “as their starting point when thinking about politics”, and that, “In time, David will be somebody considered for that sort of role.” He has time on his side. Three elections from now, he will only be as old as Obama is now.

Timms believes Britain could produce a black prime minister. Could it be him? “Not something I think about. I have the best job in the world. I can ring up the Prime Minister. I can ring up –” Lammy checks himself, “?all sorts of people.”

What about ambassador to Washington in an Obama administration? He rejects that out of hand. He’s probably too forthright for that. And while he is good company, he is not diplomat-smooth. He manages to lose his train ticket between London and Brighton when we travel to the TUC conference. The journey had begun with a somewhat Prescottian 200 yard drive from his office to Victoria station. His antennae should have been attuned to how silly this was, especially with a journalist in the car.

On a Friday night, I join Lammy at Tottenham Town Hall for his weekly surgery. An eclectic bunch of constituents cross the threshold: a woman from the Congo who is illiterate and without work and trying to bring her children into the country; a poor, disturbed woman trying to regain custody of her daughter from social services; a chap who comes out with a rather brilliant idea for reducing stabbings: stop making kitchen knives with points.

Finally, in comes a hulking teenage boy with an Afro haircut, accompanied by his black father and white mother. He wants his MP to appeal on his behalf to a sixth-form college that has clearly had enough of his disruptive antics. Lammy listens, says he will call the principal, and then launches into a stern pep talk. “Behaviour is key,” he says, fixing the boy in an unwavering gaze. “You must not fall victim to the stereotype of people who look like you. It’s up to you. You have to rise to the opportunity.”

The boy, who slumped in his chair when he came in, is beaming, grateful, standing straight and talking rather than mumbling as he leaves the room. And then the youngest member of the Government puts on his coat and rushes off home to read Topsy and Tim to his eldest son.