Lammy's flip-flop on foreign aid isn't fooling anyone

Telegraph

26-02-2025

It is a regrettable development when any senior politician's name must be regularly written with the prefix 'poor'.
For example: poor David Lammy. How was he to know that his robust criticism of the US government for slashing international aid would come back to haunt him so soon?
A fortnight ago, the Foreign Secretary compared the American administration's recent budget cut with the previous UK government's decision to scrap the Department for International Development, suggesting that this 'was a big strategic mistake', and therefore (without actually saying so) that the Trump administration's decision was similarly wrong.
Four years ago, before Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, Lammy said that it was 'wrong to cut the UK's contribution to foreign aid.' Earlier this month, according to journalist and commentator Andrew Neil, Lammy was still criticising Boris Johnson's former administration for its decision to cut the aid budget to 0.5 per cent of GDP – which is exactly where yesterday's decision by Lammy's boss, Keir Starmer, leaves it in order to raise the promised increase in defence spending.
Never have we felt such a difference between today's FCO and the FCO of 1982, when Lord Carrington chose to resign his office as a matter of honour, following his department's failure to anticipate an invasion of the Falklands by Argentina. Given the robustness of Lammy's views on foreign aid – and he has virtue-signalled his superior values to many an audience, even before taking up his current post – it would be perfectly natural to expect him to resign on principle from a government that did not share his values.
Except that suddenly, miraculously and unexpectedly, the Government does share his values after all! Or his values this week, anyway, which is more than enough to keep him in post.
This newfound political pragmatism is, in some ways, admirable. Whatever silly promises shadow ministers made when they were in opposition, sensible ministers might now recognise that what is important then may not be as important now. But foreign aid? That's a different matter.
Lammy has made a reputation for himself as the activist Foreign Secretary, using every available opportunity to associate himself not only with the Windrush generation but with the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. For him the international aid budget should be used, not just as 'soft power' to open diplomatic doors, but to make amends for foreign policy decisions taken hundreds of years ago by long-dead men. He has spoken forcibly and frequently about the evils of Tory governments that cut spending in this area.
But no longer. Yesterday he was using the X social media platform to defend a decision on defence spending that, had it been made by a Conservative government, he would have excoriated.
If the Foreign Secretary were in a mood to learn political lessons rather than give them, he might conclude that being in government is, after all, harder than it looks from the outside, involving the need, occasionally, to make unpopular decisions and disappoint supporters.
It's unlikely that he will have learnt anything at all, except how to hold onto this cabinet seat.