Last September, the son of a single mother raised in the shadow of the Broadwater Farm estate in north London attended the official proclamation of the king. It was only as David Lammy was dressing for the privy council ceremony at St James’s Palace that the experience started to feel faintly surreal.
“I got the bus back home just to feel normal,” the shadow foreign secretary says. “I get a bit emotional about this, but I can’t tell you – I’ve travelled a long, long way from where my parents started, and my upbringing, a long, long way. And that’s, in a way, the miracle of this country.” His Guyana-born parents, ardent monarchists, would doubtless have been proud, but didn’t live to see the day; as he notes, his parents, and those of his childhood friends, led hard lives and mostly died relatively young, while his posher university mates’ parents are still busy “running the world”.
