Mick Hartley

I posted about David Lammy's latest blunder the other day. Dominic Lawson in today's Sunday Times has more:

David Lammy has a peculiar knack for getting the simplest facts upside down, as anyone who recalls his — very game — appearance on Celebrity Mastermind might attest. Or the time in 2013 when the BBC tweeted, “Chimney of Sistine Chapel as conclave votes for Pope — will smoke be black or white?”, and Lammy, sitting in the Commons chamber, responded, “This tweet is crass and unnecessary. Do we really need silly innuendo about the race of the next Pope?”

His Celebrity Mastermind contribution, which Lawson kindly omits, was that the successor to Henry VIII was Henry VII. He's suggested elsewhere that women who believe in their right to single sex spaces and sports are ‘rights hoarding dinosaurs’, and that a male trans woman can grow a cervix.

But when you are foreign secretary, rather than just an attention-seeking backbencher, such ignorance is no laughing matter. Which brings us to Lammy’s brand new blog on Substack, launched last Sunday. He announced: “This is the first edition of Progressive Realism, a foreign policy newsletter where you will find an in-depth look at my approach to the UK’s foreign affairs, and how it is shaped by the principle of progressive realism.” Its logo, in red, is “PR” — which of course it is, for Lammy.

This lengthy first post is in the personal style, telling us of his close bond with the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken: “Tony and I are good friends, who share a love of music and have a similar outlook on the world of today.” Nice to know. But when it gets into complex policy matters, something bizarre appears. Lammy rightly denounces Putin’s false claim to be “seeking to ‘liberate’ Ukrainian civilians” but then veers wildly into the Caucasus: “The states of central Asia look increasingly east and south. Azerbaijan has been able to liberate territory it lost in the early 1990s … Only a few fragile regimes like Belarus, DPRK [North Korea] and Iran still align with Moscow.”

To be clear, what the foreign secretary extols here is the completion of the capture of the area of Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia by Azerbaijan. As Professor Mark Movsesian of St John’s University law school observed: “The foreign secretary’s reference to the ‘liberation’ of Nagorno-Karabakh is shockingly callous and ignorant. In fact, exactly a year ago Baku ethnically cleansed the region of 120,000 Christian Armenian inhabitants in violation of an order from the International Court of Justice.”

And, as I wrote only last week, Azerbaijan is getting closer to Moscow, not further away: “President Aliyev and President Putin enjoy the best of relations. The Azeri leader welcomed the Russian to Baku in August, returning the hospitality he had received at the Kremlin four months earlier.” I also quoted Aliyev’s sinister remarks in a speech in 2022, which referred to ethnic Armenians as “barbarians and vandals” who “established a state for themselves in someone else’s land … Present-day Armenia is our land.”

As one long-standing member of the Labour Party with appreciation of this dispute furiously WhatsApped me, referring to Lammy’s extraordinary blog: “The muppet’s chosen to back a kleptocratic dictatorship over a post-Soviet nascent democracy.”

Lammy’s blundering intervention has not gone unnoticed in the US, where there is a large Armenian diaspora. The Democrat congressman Brad Sherman declared that “David Lammy’s comments on the Armenia crisis are a stain on UK foreign policy. He has endorsed ethnic cleansing.”

Add this to the partial ban on UK arms sales to Israel – our supposed ally now engaged in an existential war against Islamist forces bent on its complete elimination – and the signs are, to put it mildly, not good.