LONDON — Donald Trump’s victory is awkward for global leaders who once denounced him.
Among those who’ve sent the president-elect congratulations is British Foreign Secretary David Lammy — who once called him a “racist” and “Nazi sympathizer.”
In 2017, Lammy tweeted that if Trump were to visit the United Kingdom, Lammy would “be out protesting on the streets.”
“He is a racist KKK and Nazi sympathizer,” Lammy, then an opposition lawmaker, wrote less than a year into Trump’s first administration. He also penned a 2018 magazine article calling the then-president “a profound threat to the international order.”
But on social media Wednesday, Lammy congratulated Trump. “We look forward to working with you,” he wrote.
In a boisterous session of Parliament, U.K. opposition leader Kemi Badenoch read aloud Lammy’s past statements and called on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to apologize for them.
“The prime minister did not distance himself from the remarks,” she told the chamber.
Several of Starmer’s Cabinet members signed past petitions seeking to ban Trump from visiting the U.K. or addressing Parliament. Trump visited Britain in 2018 and 2019, but did not address the legislature.
Wednesday was Badenoch’s first session of so-called PMQs — prime minister’s questions —-since her election last weekend as leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. She is the first Black person to hold that role.
Lammy is also Black.
Starmer also congratulated Trump early Wednesday. His center-left Labour Party’s politics are more closely aligned with Vice President Harris. But after a two-hour dinner with Trump in New York in September, Starmer said he would work with whichever candidate won the White House.
Last month, Trump’s campaign accused Starmer’s party of breaking U.S. law by sending staff to campaign for Harris. The Labour Party denies any wrongdoing and has said any members who traveled to the U.S. did so on their own time.
Meanwhile, a far-right U.K. lawmaker, Nigel Farage, who is friends with Trump, has been absent from Parliament this week to attend Republican campaign rallies in Pennsylvania and Florida.
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