Foreign secretary squirms on live TV after his anti-Trump tweets were read to him

Foreign secretary David Lammy squirmed live on air as he tried to avoid directly answering questions about his prior tweets about Donald Trump.

During an interview on BBC Breakfast, host Naga Munchetty read Lammy a series of tweets he made as a backbencher in which he described then-president Trump as ‘a neo Nazi sympathising sociopath’ and a ‘tyrant in a toupee’, among others.

Ms Munchetty asked Lammy how he planned to forge a working relationship with Trump if these tweets were used as a precedent.

In response, a visibly uncomfortable Lammy tried to deflect by saying that many politicians from both major parties had been equally disparaging to Trump during his time in the White House.

David Lammy tried to downplay his previous remarks about Donald Trump

‘You are going to struggle to find any politician who has not had things to say about Donald Trump in his first term, particularly on Twitter,’ Lammy told the presenter.

‘You’d have struggled with our last foreign secretary David Cameron who described him as a xenophobe and a misogynist.’

When Ms Muchetty tried to interject, Lammy interrupted her and referenced Trump’s newly-selected VP pick J.D Vance, who once denounced the former president as ‘America’s Hitler’.

He said: ‘You will struggle with the vice presidential candidate he has just selected who has also had things to say.

‘The truth is that with our special relationship it is special. We will work with whomever the American people choose to be in the White House over generations now whatever the colour of the political party.’

When Ms Munchetty hit back at the foreign secretary and claimed he hadn’t actually answered the question, Lammy bullishly responded: ‘I have answered the question, you just didn’t like the answer!’

Ms Munchetty then put it to Lammy that Mr Vance had since retracted his comments about Trump, and asked Lammy if he planned to do the same.

But the foreign secretary again refused to answer the question, and said: ‘Donald Trump has the thickest of skins. There is the rhetoric but look at the action. He was the first to give Javelins to Ukraine after 2015. He talked about withdrawing from Nato but actually increased troops to Nato.

‘If the American people choose Donald Trump we will work with him as closely where we can and we will seek to influence him where we disagree.

‘As I have said, Donald Trump is the biggest of political characters we have on the planet at this point. Lots of people have had things to say.

‘There is a lot of common cause with whoever Americans select to be in the White House.’

When asked about J.D Vance’s recent remarks that the UK was an ‘Islamist country’, Lammy refused to criticise the vice presidential nominee and said they both had a lot in common.

Lammy recently described himself as a ‘small-c conservative’ (Picture: Reuters)

He told the BBC: ‘On J. D. Vance, I have met him, we have similar working class backgrounds with addiction issues in our families. We have written books on that, we have talked about that and we are both Christians. So I think we can find common ground with J. D. Vance.’

Mr Vance made the remarks last week at the National Conservatism conference in Washington DC, also attended by former home secretary Suella Braverman.

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government have been keen to stress that they will work with whoever the US electorate returns to the White House to protect the so-called US/UK ‘special relationship’.

During a recent appearance at a Republican conference in Washington DC, Lammy described himself as a ‘small-c conservative’ and insisted Trump was ‘often misunderstood’ over commitment to Nato.

The foreign secretary said the ex-president was ‘a leader whose attitude to European security is often misunderstood’ and inisted that as a ‘good Christian boy’ he would attempt to find ‘common cause’ with Donald Trump’s program.

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