In his first year in office as foreign secretary, David Lammy has made an astonishing 47 trips abroad. One of the most recent stamps on his diplomatic passport is from Malaysia, where he attended the 58th ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on 12 July.
As the event was opened by prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, he underlined in the official communique the principle of “centrality” as ASEAN’s guiding message, emphasising the need to ensure that, as one international scholar put it, the southeast Asian organisation should be the engine which empowers “the evolving regional architecture of the Asia Pacific”.
