As he sits back in his House Of Commons office, David Lammy reflects on a political career that has defied conventional trajectories.

“I do genuinely believe that I am in some senses privileged to have a platform in an extraordinary political age,” he says. “Issues of race, of immigration, of identity are contested and debated vociferously at this point in time, in a way that I just could not have perceived, or believed, when I was at university.”

To backtrack: when I first met the Labour MP for Tottenham, almost two decades ago, he was a New Labour meteor, a barrister with a postgraduate degree from Harvard, certainly destined for high office. A health minister a mere two years after he arrived in the Commons in 2000, he rose through the ranks to become a minister of state for culture in 2005 and privy councillor in 2008. He was at the very centre, in every sense.

Often in politics one’s required to be a bit impartial, but I lost someone I know in that fire

Since then, however, he has followed a different – and, frankly, more compelling – path. It is usual for politicians to be passionate tribunes in their youth and technocrats in middle age, but this 46-year-old has reversed the sequence. “I deliberately am not interested in preferment [now],” he says. “I try very hard not to make that my central focus.”

Instead, when Donald Trump visited Britain in July, it was Lammy’s powerful speech in Trafalgar Square that best captured the righteous fury of the protestors. At the height of the Windrush scandal – as it became horribly clear that thousands of people who arrived in the UK from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1971 were quite wrongly facing deportation – Lammy was once again on the front line, fighting for their rights. And, to this day, he remains sleepless in his pursuit of justice for the Grenfell Tower tragedy. “I’ve got to be honest. I’m not impartial. Often in politics one’s required to be a bit impartial, but I lost someone I know in that fire,” he says.

How to account for the change in Lammy’s political direction? I don’t think that his ambition has declined: quite the opposite, in fact. Rather, it is now focused like a laser upon campaigning and the heavy lifting of social justice.

All of which being said, is he still an optimist? “Oh.” He grins. “I suppose ultimately I am.” We fight on, we fight to win? “That’s right.”

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