Now the dust has settled over the Parliamentary chaos of the last few days, it’s time to take stock.
Out: Angela Rayner, after a spectacular fall from grace that was sparked by her tax records. In: David Lammy, her replacement. He’ll be taking up the mantle of Deputy Prime Minister, and while the position of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party remains unfilled, there’s doubtless be a scrum to fill it in the next couple of months.
So, who is David Lammy, and what does he stand for? Here’s what to know.
Early life
Lammy was born in July 1972 in Archway, a borough of North London, to David and Rosalind, who were Guyanese. David was a taxidermist, and owned his own factory, but when Lammy was young, the business started to fail.
“He really struggled,” Lammy told the Times in 2023. “He lost his stride really in the recessions of the early Eighties. His business went down. I’m very conscious of the way in which working people can be knocked around by the vicissitudes of life. And I wanted something more.”
David senior left the family when Lammy was 12, and according to him, “died a pauper… unable to even have a marked grave.” “I never saw him again,” he wrote in a Guardian article. “I have always felt that hole in my life.”
From that point on, Lammy and his four siblings were raised by his mother. In the same Guardian article, he wrote that “my mum had no choice but to take on three jobs because she had been abandoned.”
The young Lammy grew up in Tottenham, attending first Downhills Primary School, then The King’s School in Peterborough after winning an Inner London Education Authority choral scholarship to study and sing there.
From there, he attended the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, graduating with a 2:1 in law. After a brief career as a lawyer, he went to study at Harvard, becoming the first black Briton ever to attend.
"I had always found myself looking to America and being interested in what was happening there,” he told the Independent in 2007. “A lot has been said over the years about the fact that I was the first black Briton to go, but I think it was just because nobody else had applied!
“I learnt a tremendous amount at Harvard and it serves me well to this day - the ability to pick up the phone to Barack Obama because we both went to that law school, for example.”
Legal career
From there, the young Lammy started his legal career proper in the US. He went to work at Howard Rice in California between 1997 and 1998, and worked at D. J. Freeman until 2000.
But at that point, he found that his attention was drifting back towards the UK, and a career in politics.
“I'd always been the kind of lawyer that was attracted back to policy,” he told the Independent.
“There are a group of us, practitioners, who find themselves going back to the question of how to change policy for good - not liking the way the world is and wanting to change things. So, there are some lawyers who just find themselves wanting to become Members of Parliament.”
In May 2000, Lammy was elected as the Labour candidate for Tottenham, after the death of Bernie Grant, and won the seat in a by-election. Suddenly, he was 27 and a Member of Parliament – the youngest in the House at the time.
Parliamentary career
Lammy’s star rose quickly. While Labour was in power, he was made the Parliamentary under-secretary of state in the Department of Health by Tony Blair. A year later, in 2003, he was appointed to the same role in the Department for Constitutional Affairs.
Under Gordon Brown, he was made Minister of State in 2008, and then the Minister for Higher Education in 2009.
In 2005, he also got married – to the artist Nicola Green, the daughter of Sir Malcolm Green. The pair went onto have two sons and adopted a daughter.
During Labour’s years out of power, Lammy was repeatedly re-elected to his constituency of Tottenham, and attempted an election run to be declared the Labour candidate for London Mayor in 2014 (he ultimately came fourth, behind Sadiq Khan and Diane Abbott). Two years later, in 2016, he was fined £5,000 for instigating 35,000 automatic phone calls to Labour party members, urging them to back his run for mayor. It was the first time a politician had been fined for authorising nuisance calls, and Lammy apologised “unreservedly” for doing so.
Over his career, Lammy has also spoken frequently about issues of race, crime and discrimination. A review of the criminal justice system led by him in 2017 exposed that “disproportionate numbers” of young people from black and ethnic minority communities were being channelled through the justice system due to bias against them.
He has called out Britain’s history of slavery in speeches – telling a conference in 2008 that “we need to talk about the systematic division of persons along a hierarchy of colour, darkest at the bottom, lightest at the top, which arguably continues to pervade our language and attitudes to this day.”
He has also fiercely criticised the Windrush scandal, writing in the Guardian that it was “an immigration policy that was allowed to – even designed to – dehumanise, demonise and victimise British citizens.”
Foreign Secretary
Though he had served as Shadow Foreign Secretary during Labour’s years out of power, in 2024, Lammy was appointed Foreign Secretary by Keir Starmer, and has sought to build a strong relationship with the Trump government (see: the furore over his recent fishing trip with JD Vance) as well as resetting relations with the European Union and China.
Lammy has also described himself as a “liberal, progressive Zionist” in September 2024; in October 2024, he argued that calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide “undermines the seriousness of that term.” In response, MP Chris Law stated his comment showed "blatant contempt for the fundamental rights and the very lives of Palestinians.”
As of 3 August 2025, according to Declassified UK, he has also received at least £32,640 from the Israel Lobby.
