I have been known to do the odd guest lecture and thoroughly enjoyed it." "I sometimes think if I wasn't in politics I might quite like to be a lecturer, if someone would have me. Mr Lammy is an associate fellow of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick and is "very proud" of his honorary doctorate from the University of East London. "I come to this job really aware of not just the economic benefits of education - the fact that I can pay my mortgage, provide for my own family - but that the education I have experienced, the joys of learning for learning's sake, of a liberal arts education at Soas and Harvard, have profoundly changed my life." Mr Lammy says his upbringing means he understands the power of education. He had been set up for a fall - and it came in 2004, when his handling of a Commons debate on the controversial "living wills" Bill was lambasted in the press.Ī Labour loyalist who voted in favour of introducing student top-up fees and the Iraq war, he was Skills Minister at Dius before his promotion earlier this month. "Like his role model, he is a barrister, a former choirboy and a keen Christian." "Mr Lammy has been dubbed the black Blair because his track record is uncannily similar to the PM's," said The Sun after then Prime Minister Tony Blair gave him his first government job, as junior health minister. Instead, Mr Lammy studied law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), an institution he describes as "an absolute gem", and went on to become the first black Briton to study for a masters in law at Harvard University.Īs soon as Tottenham elected him Britain's youngest MP in 2000, he was tipped as the nation's first black Prime Minister. In the end, as nice as they were to me, I didn't get the grades to go." "It was a very daunting process - as it is for anyone who has an interview at Cambridge. That year, he won a choral scholarship to the King's School in Peterborough, became head boy and applied to Cambridge University. Mr Lammy, 36, was one of five children of Guyanese parents and was raised by his council-worker mother after his father walked out when he was 11. Mr Lammy spoke to Times Higher Education in the first weeks of his promotion in the government reshuffle. "I grew up in Tottenham in the 1970s and early '80s and I think if you had asked anyone there whether it was probable, likely - possible - that I would be the Minister of State for Higher Education, they would have laughed hysterically in your face," David Lammy says of his new position at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (Dius).