David Lammy was appointed as Shadow Foreign Secretary in November 2021.
He was first elected as the Labour Member of Parliament for Tottenham at a by-election on 22nd June 2000. He was reelected in 2019 with a massive majority of 30,175.
The constituency of Tottenham is an inner London seat that covers the centre and east of the London Borough of Haringey. This is an ethnically diverse area in which a fifth of the electorate are of Afro Caribbean descent, and where there are also large Muslim and Jewish communities, as well as Cypriot, Eastern European and Russian communities. The seat contains the Broadwater Farm Estate, once the scene of rioting in the mid 1980s. There were more recently riots in this part of London in 2011. The seat contains Tottenham’s White Hart Lane football ground. The area has been safe Labour territory ever since the Second World War.
Before his November 2021 promotion, Lammy previously sat in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Shadow Lord Chancellor.
During the last Labour government, Lammy served as a junior Minister in the Department of Health, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport,. Between 2008 and 2010, he was the Minister for Higher Education and Intellectual Property in the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.
David Lammy was born in Tottenham on 19th July, 1972, one of five children raised by a single mother. He won a scholarship as a chorister to attend a state choral school at The Kings School in Peterborough. He came back to London in 1990 to study law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Law School.
Admitted to the Bar of England and Wales in 1994, David became the first Black Briton to study a Masters in Law at the Harvard Law School in 1997. He worked as a barrister before becoming a Labour MP at the age of just 28.
Lammy nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour leadership in 2015, but he is considered to be more on the soft left of the Labour Party. He backed Sir Keir Starmer in the 2020 leadership contest.
Lammy has campaigned for Windrush British citizens to be granted British citizenship and paid compensation by the government. He also the the author of “Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots”, which was an analysis of the causes of the 2011 riots in Tottenham.
David Lammy is Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Groups on Fatherhood; Vice Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Groups on Alevis; and Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Groups on Faith and Society.
Lammy is is a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, the Christian Socialist Movement, the Fabian Society, Progress and of the Amicus Branch of Unite.
He is said to be a friend of the former US President, Barack Obama.
Lammy is married with three children. He is a gifted public speaker, and the Register of Members Interests has in the past showed him to receive a number of payments for a whole range of speaking engagements.
Email: lammyd@parliament.uk
Website – https://www.davidlammy.co.uk/
Twitter: twitter.com/DavidLammy
