The new foreign secretary in Keir Starmer’s government, David Lammy, is a lawyer, descendant of slaves and a friend of, among others, former US president Barack Obama.

Known for his straightforwardness, the 51-year-old Lamy has already said that the history of his ancestors, who were slaves as far back as the 19th century in Guyana on sugar cane plantations, will influence how he carries out his duties.

“I will take incredibly seriously the responsibility of being the first Secretary of State, a descendant of the slave trade,” he said recently.

David Lammy has been Labour’s foreign affairs chief for two years and has made more than 40 overseas visits, promoting his own vision of British diplomacy, based on a doctrine he calls “progressive realism”. It thus combines the pragmatic approach taken by British foreign minister Ernest Bevin in the late 1940s with the moral idealism of Robin Cook in the 1990s. The former participated in the establishment of NATO after World War II while the latter oversaw the successful interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, to leave Tony Blair’s government over the intervention in Iraq.

This approach consists of “seeing the world as it is, not as we would like it to be,” Lammy has said, according to which British diplomacy “needs to rediscover the art of grand strategy” after leaving the European Union. He advocates closer cooperation with the “27”, continued support for Ukraine and the creation of a Palestinian state, as soon as conditions permit.

David Lammy was born in London in 1972 to parents who emigrated from Guyana to the UK. His childhood was marked by the flight of his father, as a result of which his mother raised her five children alone.

“I never saw him again. I’ve always felt a void in my life and I’m not the only one,” he wrote in the Guardian newspaper in 2013, in a series of articles on the importance of fathers in children’s lives.

He grew up in Tottenham, north London, and has been an elected MP since 2000. In the late 90s, he was the first black Briton to study at Harvard Law School and friendly with Barack Obama at a black alumni event. His wife, artist Nicola Green, documented Obama’s 2018 campaign in a series of portraits.

When first elected in 2000, aged 27, Lammy was the youngest MP ever elected to the House of Commons. He then held posts in various ministries in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

David Lammy is a staunch supporter of the “special relationship” between London and Washington but has had to reassure people he could work with Donald Trump if the Republican ex-president returns to the White House in November’s election. Britain’s new foreign minister had described the former US president as a “sociopath with neo-Nazi sympathies” who “hates women”. But he later said his remarks were “misunderstood” and promised to take a pragmatic approach. According to several British media outlets, his team has already been in contact with Trump’s for several weeks.