David Lammy has unintentionally performed a national service and it will cost Labour dearly - Lee Cohen

Lammy didn’t merely remove a portrait. He tried to evict the single most beloved figure in modern British history from the very institution she dignified for seventy years. The gesture tells the world everything it needs to know about who is now running British foreign policy.

Labour suffers a reflexive cringe at the sight of British greatness. It embarrasses them. Tradition, continuity, monarchy, sovereignty — these things are an itchy wool jumper the party cannot bear to put on. And the late monarch embodied those virtues with an effortlessness that made generations of politicians look small.

Queen Elizabeth represented service without ego, duty without theatrics, national identity without politics. She unified Britain effortlessly. Which is precisely why Labour’s ideologues resent her. She proved that patriotism does not need Establishment permission to exist. She eclipsed the Establishment.

Lammy’s decision to remove her portrait didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s the natural instinct of a party that would prefer a Britain constantly apologising for itself, perpetually edited and re-edited to match the sensibilities of the modern progressive imagination.

If Labour needed a face for its ongoing identity crisis, it has found it in David Lammy. His public persona has always depended on positioning Britain as a nation that must continually atone — a country defined more by alleged sins than by unmatched achievements.

He speaks the language of “reckoning”, “accountability”, and “historic responsibility”, yet rarely manages a sentence celebrating Britain’s extraordinary role in global history. He approaches national pride as if it were a toxic substance requiring gloves and tongs.

And now, as Foreign Secretary, he has done what he has always done: police Britain’s memory. Ensure that even the walls of his department conform to the rewired, sanitised history Labour wants to impose.

Lammy couldn’t bear to look at the Queen. Not because the portrait offended him, but because what she represented embarrasses progressives like him.

Here in the USA, we have seen this movie before, and let me tell you: it doesn’t end well.

When Barack Obama first entered the Oval Office, he promptly removed the bust of Winston Churchill. When questioned, he hid behind diplomatic niceties, but everyone knew what was happening. A President steeped in progressive ideology could not abide a symbol of Anglo-American exceptionalism staring at him from across the room.

Joe Biden continued the tradition. Same bust, same erasure, same ideological discomfort.

Lammy’s removal of the Queen is simply the British adaptation of the same worldview:

Progressive governments — whether in Washington or London — cannot stand symbols that remind nations of who they were before the professional activist class seized cultural power.

Here in America, Queen Elizabeth II was not just respected — she was revered. She was seen as the West’s last great embodiment of dignity and stability in public life. Even Americans who know little about Britain instinctively understood her importance.

That Britain’s own Foreign Secretary cannot tolerate her image speaks volumes — about him, not her.

This is the same Labour Party that preaches endlessly about “restoring trust in institutions” and “respecting public life”. Yet its leading diplomat cannot even show respect for the one institution that consistently earned it.

Labour’s reverence is selective; their patriotism conditional; their respect manufactured. They treat the monarchy the way a schoolchild treats homework: tolerable only when forced, resented at all other times.

What Lammy has done may look trivial. It is anything but. Great nations do not fall because of arguments about paintings. They fall because their elites become ashamed of their inheritance.

The Left fear a Britain that remembers what it once was: confident, sovereign, unapologetic, resolute. A Britain that shaped the world. A Britain whose great Queen didn’t need ideology to command loyalty — she ruled through character.

So they remove the portrait and hope no one notices the deeper message: Your past is obsolete. Your heritage is embarrassing. Look away.

Once a country begins erasing the symbols that anchor its identity, decline accelerates quickly. We learned that the hard way, until Trump brought national pride roaring back. Britain must follow this lead.

Lammy has unintentionally performed a national service. He has revealed Labour’s cultural inferiority complex — small, reactive, insecure, and terrified of the very history it inherited.

Britons should respond not by shrugging, but by reclaiming the pride he cannot comprehend.

Queen Elizabeth II deserves a place in every heart that understands what Britain once meant — and still can mean, if its leaders stop trying to tear down the reminders.

Lammy may remove the portrait. But he cannot remove the truth of what she was. And he will not erase the country she helped hold together.