This is a man who can’t even book a taxi without turning it into an international incident. A former foreign secretary whose undiplomatic response to a malfunctioning cash machine was to curse the “f***ing French”. As justice secretary, he’s presiding over our disastrous prison system, where inmates come and go as they please, and has been called a “coward” by his own ministers.
Calamity Lammy commits career suicide every time he steps out in public. Last week, he strode into Parliament without a poppy, then lectured us about the importance of Remembrance Sunday. To cap it all, he covered his embarrassment by taking a poppy from an actual veteran. He also presided over what’s been called the worst PMQs in living memory, hurling abuse across the chamber, arms flailing, fingers jabbing.
Yet even a stuck clock is right twice a day, and Mr Calamity has shocked Westminster by saying something that’s actually right.
And in doing so he’s piled still more humiliation on his boss, Keir Starmer.
Now that’s risky, given the PM is the only person left in the country who thinks Lammy deserves to keep his job.
Lammy has privately warned Starmer to rein in his endless overseas trips. He said the PM’s constant flights abroad were distracting him from the crises erupting at home.
Starmer brushed it off. Last week he chalked up his fortieth foreign jolly since entering Downing Street, jetting into Brazil for the Cop30 summit.
He’s clocked up more air miles than any PM this century and has been labelled ‘Never Here Keir’. Incredibly, he’s due to jet off another half dozen times before Christmas.
While Britain careers into chaos, Starmer’s flying high. Anything to avoid the voters or his own mutinous backbenchers.
Lammy was right to call him out. But only half right. Because Starmer’s doing such a lousy job when he is in the UK, he might as well be permanently abroad. Voters might prefer that. The Labour Party definitely would.
Even when Starmer is in the country, he keeps his distance. MPs rarely see him. He looks straight through lesser souls on his own backbenches. Which leaves him desperately short of friends when things go wrong, as they repeatedly do.
The PM won’t last long. Next May’s local elections could sink him, when Labour takes a hammering. That won’t be the final humiliation though.
A rational observer would assume Lammy’s career ends with Starmer’s.
But given the calamitous state of the Labour Party today, MPs and activists might convince themselves that Lammy should be Britain’s next PM. And that would humiliate every single one of us.
