The Lammy

If they are not already doing so, the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, the de facto custodians of the English language, ought to be considering a new noun – ‘a lammy.’ Inspired by the Falstaff of the front benches, David Lammy, it means a public figure, such as a politician, who wishes to appear very important and clever by making grand statements, but who ends up making a fool of himself because those statements are erroneous. There is also potential for the noun to take on the self-reflexive infinitive form of ‘to lammy.’ We can thus imagine X saying that Y lammied himself during a job interview or when he gave an after-dinner speech. Another way of saying the same could be ‘to make a lammy of oneself.’

There are levels of seriousness when it comes to being a lammy. At the lowest level, the consequence of being one is borne exclusively by, or mainly by, the lammy himself. For instance, a lammy could participate in a tough quiz programme such as Mastermind in order to appear seriously knowledgeable and yet make basic errors such as claiming Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, and that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII. Though his friends and family might feel embarrassed by his performance, the consequence of such errors are essentially borne by the lammy: he fails to win Mastermind and looks foolish.

A more serious kind of being a lammy is to attempt to garner popularity with one’s fellow party members and voters by accusing an opponent of egregious things of which he is not guilty. If the lammy is left-of-centre, he might accuse his right-wing opponent of being a Nazi, and do so in publications such as Time magazine. These insults are stock accusations of left-wing lammies. What makes this an example of being a lammy is that the lammy, after having made these accusations, finds himself embarrassingly having to work alongside the politician he has just abused, perhaps on a cross-party parliamentary committee. If the lammy has risen to the heights of a cabinet post, let us say foreign secretary, his rude and crude denunciations of a foreign politician whom he did not expect would become a serious challenger for the position of president, now means he faces the possibility of having to work with that man and his government. At this point, the lammy, when challenged by journalists about his remarks, will endeavour to exculpate himself by claiming that many others have made such accusations and that he is not the only one. This response only serves to reveal how much of a lammy he is, and a prime candidate for a cabinet reshuffle into a less prominent role more in keeping with his limited abilities.

One of the most serious examples of being a lammy is to declare ignorantly though pompously that something is a good thing when in fact it is a very bad thing. Take the example again of a lammy who is a foreign minister. Let us imagine he is informed that a nation has absorbed by force a piece of territory and mistakenly welcomes that act as a war of liberation of that territory. The reality is that this territory is a breakaway state and does not wish to be part of the nation that has regained it. To make matters worse, the attacking nation has ethnically cleansed the territory so that it does not seek independence again.

A real example of this is what Azerbaijan has done to the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Populated by Armenians, Nagorno-Karabakh wishes to be independent of Azerbaijan and calls itself Artsakh. To prevent the loss of this territory, Azerbaijan launched an invasion during which war crimes were committed against civilians. The invasion has been described as a second Armenian genocide by a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. In this instance, by giving his blessing to this horrifying démarche, the lammy reveals his ignorance of a serious flashpoint in international relations, which in a foreign minister is unacceptable.

The job of foreign minister is one that requires real intelligence to understand the labyrinthine complexities of international relations. It also necessitates a disciplined use of language, for how a foreign minister speaks and writes can affect relations with foreign powers. It is not a role that is suitable for a lammy. How long the quintessence of lammies, the Rt. Hon. David Lammy, will last as foreign secretary is a matter of speculation but it may not be long. With Keir ‘Standing Army’ Starmer up to his pixie ears in accusations of sleaze over outfit-gate, his patience with the gaffe-prone Talleyrand of Tottenham is likely to be short, and especially so in the light of Lammy’s erroneous claim that gifts of clothing to Starmer’s wife are okay because the US has a clothing budget for its leaders. As Starmer has a Soviet mindset, perhaps he will disappear Lammy and put him in charge of some remote tractor plant instead.

Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).

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