It is the list on which any member of the British beau monde aspires to appear, a guide to the most significant and desirable guests to grace one’s society party this summer. The Social Power Index, compiled each year by the upper class style bible Tatler, is the familiar home of billionaires, dukes and it girls, and for the past two years has been topped by King Charles and Queen Camilla, described as “the power, the glory and the gatekeepers” of British high society. Which has made the appearance of one name near the top of this year’s list something of a surprise: that of Labour’s shadow foreign secretary David Lammy.
Lammy appears with his wife, the artist Nicola Green, at number two on this year’s list, just behind the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, who recently tied the knot in “the grandest wedding of the year”, according to the magazine. Lammy, in contrast to the duke’s privileged upbringing, is one of five siblings who were raised by his single mother in a working-class household in Tottenham, north London. After 24 years as the area’s MP, however, he is hoping next week’s general election will return him to Westminster, and to one of the most powerful roles in government.
Described as “a shapeshifting prince of political invention”, Lammy “didn’t want Trident renewed, but he does cherish power”, writes the magazine’s associate editor Sacha Forbes. “Yes, socially, David Lammy and his wife, artist Nicola Green, have made it.” Lammy, 51, may have grown up in challenging circumstances in an area that was blighted by the 1985 race riots, but his biography makes him difficult to pigeonhole socially. At the age of 10 he won a choral scholarship to the King’s School in Peterborough, the state-funded school for choristers in the city’s cathedral, going on to be its head boy. He was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London and at Harvard Law School, becoming its first Black British alumnus. He worked for several California law firms before returning to the UK in 2000, standing for the seat of Tottenham after the death of its long-term MP Bernie Grant. At 27, he was the youngest then member of parliament. Green, whom Lammy married in 2005, is a portrait painter and social historian whose work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Library of Congress. In 2008 she shadowed the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, a longtime friend of Lammy’s, until his election, producing a series of artworks. The couple have three children. As a child, Lammy has previously acknowledged: “I wanted to be somebody. My dad died a pauper in the United States, and he really was a nobody by the time he died. So, that was a powerful driver.” Lammy has also spoken in the past of his irritation with political labels, which have at different times pigeonholed him variously as a Blairite or a leftwinger. Instead, he said: “I’m interested in power.” Should his party win the election, he will have plenty of that as foreign secretary. One recent report described Lammy as a “Trump whisperer” who had adopted a softly-softly approach on a recent visit to Washington, in an attempt to lobby the Biden and Trump teams on Ukraine. Lammy’s “stealthy effort below the waterline” was “further evidence of an opposition which wants to be taken seriously as a government in waiting”, the Sunday Times said. Nine days before the election, Lammy was not available on Tuesday to discuss his society cachet, or his views on Tatler’s definition of what unites the socially powerful – namely “Good looks, glamour, philanthropy and desirable houses, of course. But also Cheltenham races, St Moritz, Scotland and the South of France.” Tatler declined to expand on how its list was selected, or why Lammy and Green were ahead of third placed David Ross, a wealthy businessman and Tory donor whom the magazine says “is everywhere, squiring duchesses around the National Portrait Gallery and overseeing the Nevill Holt festival on his Leicestershire estate, where you can expect to see a swathe of local grandees, from Orlando Rock to Sir Alan Duncan”. Other names on the list include, at five, “the new it couple on the London scene”, model Iris Law and footballer Trent Alexander-Arnold, Rupert Murdoch and his new wife Elena Zhukova in sixth, and the British deputy ambassador to France, Theo Rycroft and his wife, the Hon Flora Rycroft, who were placed eighth.