told the Guardian, external<\/a> he, Vance and Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner bonded over drinks in the Villa Taverna, the US ambassador’s residence in Rome. <\/p>\n“I had this great sense that JD completely relates to me and he completely relates to Angela. So it was a wonderful hour and a half,” he said. “I was probably the shyest of the three.”<\/p>\n
He said that, like Vance, Rayner and himself were “not just working-class politicians, but people with dysfunctional childhoods”.<\/p>\n
Lammy’s parents split up during his teens. His father went to the US and Lammy never saw him again. <\/p>\n
Vance told the story of his own upbringing – including an absent father and a mother with a drug addiction – in his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. <\/p>\n
Despite their trickier starts in life, both ended up at prestigious US colleges. Lammy studied at Harvard, where he met and befriended Barack Obama. Vance went to Harvard’s rival Yale – “not quite as good,” Lammy joked at Chevening. <\/p>\n
The two men have also bonded over their Christian faith. Vance converted to Catholicism as an adult and took mass with Lammy when he visited Washington DC earlier this year. <\/p>\n
The pair have something else in common, although neither want to to draw attention to it: their previous less-than-flattering comments about Donald Trump. <\/p>\n
JD Vance’s past verdict – “reprehensible”, “an idiot”, “I never liked him”.<\/p>\n
And Lammy’s? “A tyrant” and “a woman-hating, neo Nazi sympathising sociopath”. <\/p>\n
Be it political expediency or a genuine change of heart, both have since revised their opinions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Vance acknowledged the two men come from “different political spectrums” but said Lammy had been “kind enough to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[748,393,4884,12,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-329312","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-northern-ireland","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114996196317621254","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}