Does David Lammy really expect Donald Trump to forgive and forget?

David Lammy has never been much of a diplomat. The veteran Labour MP is fond of lashing out at his critics, but now, as shadow foreign secretary, he has travelled to the United States to lay the groundwork for a future Labour government’s foreign policy. He may find that some of his earlier oratorical fury comes back to haunt him.

Lammy has compared Conservative MPs in the European Research Group to Nazis and supporters of apartheid South Africa. In 2013, when the BBC wondered if the smoke seen after the next round of the papal conclave would be black or white – its colour would announce whether or not a decision had been reached – he tweeted with outrage that the corporation was making a ‘silly innuendo about the race of the next pope’. He later apologised. Three years later, Lammy claimed that the million Indian soldiers who died during the Second World War had given their lives for ‘the European project’.