David Lammy smiled with JD Vance and posted the photo, and in doing so he blew Labour’s ability to claim ethical high ground after Minnesota. Right, so David Lammy chose to post a smiling photo with JD Vance on the same day Vance was out defending the killing of a civilian by US state agents, and that choice has just stripped Labour of its last excuse. Not outrage, not optics — cover. The Justice Secretary didn’t just stay silent, and has remained so on Twitter over that shooting, he has made that silence government policy in the eyes of all of us and once you do that, what makes you any better than the defenders of that egregious act? From here on, Labour doesn’t get the benefit of assumed ethics therefore, assuming you believed they still had some, because the person meant to supply them – the Justice Secretary no less - just advertised their absence. So in this video I’m going to show you how that role was being used, why Lammy mattered to it particularly, and what starts failing now that it’s gone. Right, so David Lammy posted a smiling photo of himself with JD Vance and told the world he’d had an “important discussion” about peace and security, and he did it right after a woman had been killed by US immigration enforcement in Minnesota and after Vance had spent the day publicly defending the killing and blaming the victim. Lammy didn’t comment on that killing. He didn’t acknowledge it. He didn’t distance himself from Vance’s remarks anywhere before, during or since. He didn’t slow the post down. He pressed publish, attached the photo, and moved on. That act wasn’t a diplomatic necessity, it was a discretionary performance, and it collided with a moral line that requires no briefing paper to recognise, though perhaps politicians are in more need of having these things spelt out to them than we all are. David Lammy isn’t a junior minister learning the ropes. He isn’t a private backbencher tweeting carelessly. He’s the Justice Secretary, which means every public signal is deliberate or negligent, and there’s no meaningful difference between the two. Meetings happen. Tweets don’t have to. Photos don’t have to be posted. Warmth doesn’t have to be advertised. When those things are chosen, they become political acts in their own right, and that choice now sits there in public, fixed and timestamped and open to judgment.