DAVID Lammy has revealed that someone in the UK thinks he is doing a good job as Foreign Secretary – him.
In a spectacularly self-indulgent interview with LBC’s James O’Brien, Lammy said he had shrugged off the “impostor syndrome” which had dogged him his whole life until he was made a Cabinet minister.
His reign at the Foreign Office has seen a brutal man-made famine sweep across Gaza, while Britain continues to arm Israel, and the White House imposing tariffs on the UK as part of Donald Trump’s war on international free trade.
Lammy’s blunders include referring to Israel’s plans to herd Palestinians into a concentration camp in Gaza as a “sticking point” and referring to members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as “extremists” as UK-made arms still flowed to Israel.
On the other side, he has been criticised in the right-wing press for accusing Israel of breaking international law – which it obviously is, but that is not the official government line. He had to row that one back and blamed jetlag for speaking out of turn.
'Something just fell off my shoulders. There was this sense that I'm the right guy in the right job at the right time.'@DavidLammy opens up to James O'Brien about having imposter syndrome at every stage of his life, until he became Foreign Secretary.
— LBC (@LBC) July 25, 2025
In a statement on the collapse of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria in December, Lammy seemed to reveal that he didn’t know where the country was as he referred to the risk of it falling into anarchy “like Libya next door”. In the same statement, he also referred to Sudan as being “not far away”, which is true if you think that a distance of almost 2000 miles means somewhere is reasonably close.
Speaking on O’Brien’s profoundly missable Full Disclosure podcast, Lammy said: “I have, up until relatively recently, impostor syndrome at nearly every critical stage of my life and certainly, on a more personal level, at the moments in nearly every decade of my life struggled with anxiety.
He added: “I literally walked into No 10, the Prime Minister asked me to be Foreign Secretary, I walked into the Foreign Office and – I’m going to get emotional again – and it just fell off my shoulders.
“I had arrived and there was a powerful sense that I was the right guy, in the right job, at the right time to do this and a certain kind of innate confidence in my ability to do this that has carried me through and continues to this day.”
Bully for him.
