New Labour MP Peter Lamb: 'I’m too fat to have sharp elbows'

Peter Lamb was initially picked as a parliamentary candidate for the 2019 election. The first council leader in the country to call for Jeremy Corbyn to go, he was one of just a handful of Corbynsceptics to be selected. He lost by more than 8,000 votes. But on his second try, under Keir Starmer in July, he won by over 5,000.

On paper, the new Labour MP for Crawley should be aligned with the current leadership. And yet, in these early days of Labour being in power, from the Chagos agreement to the Gaza war, he has already shown himself to be unafraid of diverging from the party line.

“We’re not going to want for people who are prepared to be toadies in the system”

Why not keep quiet in the hope he can climb the ranks and exert influence from the inside, as so many of his 2024 intake colleagues are doing? Is his independent-minded approach the result of being a former council leader?

“I’m not here just as a first-year MP. I’m here as someone who’s been doing this at a fairly high level for eight years before this, and consequently I’ve got a bit more confidence about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it,” Lamb agrees.

“We’re not going to want for people who are prepared to be toadies in the system. I’m too fat to have sharp elbows, frankly.”

Lamb, 38, was born in Crawley to a Labour family. His mother was a social worker and his father a scientist who worked at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory and helped start Computing for Labour. “Most of my family are physicists so I’m viewed as a bit of a disappointment,” says the MP.

His middle name is Keir, though he stopped putting it on anything electoral around four years ago because “the number of us who’ve got that name seems very cult-like”. 

He joined the party aged 16, when he saw how many of his fellow secondary school pupils were not getting what a young Lamb considered to be the basics of a decent quality of life. “I got very angry about that,” he recalls.

He describes his political journey as “starting off with a somewhat Marxist bent and gradually adopting more pragmatic positions”. These days, he is on the ‘soft left’ of the party, and voted for Lisa Nandy in the last leadership contest.

From 2014 to 2022, Lamb was leader of Crawley borough council. He quit after spending his entire honeymoon dealing with an incident involving the mayor. “I did wonder to myself at that point, what am I doing to the people I love?”

And he thought becoming an MP instead would be a good idea? “I had to spend a bit of time persuading my wife about that… We know what the divorce rates are for MPs – incredibly high. I’m lucky, I can go home every night.” (Crawley is less than an hour’s commute from Westminster.)

“I’m here, ultimately, because I spent a long time trying to resolve things on the ground. And council leaders have way more power than the average MP. In many ways, it’s a much more fun job.

“What they don’t have is any respect; they don’t have pensions, so every year we’re doing it, we’re sacrificing our family’s future; and your career comes to an end not because of something you’ve done but something that’s happened in central government.

“When you start trying to find alternative employment, you’ll suddenly find everyone thinks you spent all those years sat on a sofa eating Wotsits somewhere, rather than dealing with £100m regeneration budgets.”

“My fear is that, with this agreement with Mauritius, there will never be an opportunity to make right what we made wrong”

But he did find employment – with The Campaign Company, the consultancy founded by recent Labour general secretary David Evans, and where No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney also worked for a time.

Lamb says their paid work included consultations about restructures, often for the NHS, while the “fun”, unpaid work was for Labour. They promoted a “values modes” tool that leads Lamb to conclude: “The same policy can appeal to the entirety of the community if you find the right way of selling it.”

One policy that Lamb believes does not appeal to his community is the government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. After a long history of rows over its sovereignty, last month it was announced that a deal had been struck which had US backing and would save the UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. Foreign Secretary David Lammy called it “a victory for diplomacy”.

In the 60s and 70s, islanders were forcibly removed by the UK to make way for a US airbase. From 2002, native-born Chagossians have had the right to claim British citizenship, and more recently their direct descendants have been entitled to the same. Today, a quarter of the world’s Chagossians live in Crawley.

“They arrived in the UK and there was no support available. There continues to be a lot of resentment about that to this day. But having landed at Gatwick in my constituency, they chose to settle there, for the most part,” Lamb explains.

“When we saw the announcement, which came completely out blue – [the Foreign Office] had tried to organise a meeting earlier in the day with me, an hour before the news was going to break – I thought it was a follow-up on a whole range of issues the Chagossians are facing now…

“I assumed – bear in mind, the first email I sent as an MP was on this issue – that finally I was going to have a conversation about how we can try to address it. Instead, apparently it was that we were going to give away their country to someone else.”

Lamb is candid about the difficult situation he found himself in.

“It’s very awkward. I’m a first-term MP. I can be quite outspoken. But you don’t plan on actively talking down your own party in the first couple of months of being a Member of Parliament.

“But if there is no engagement with back benchers over things that have strong constituency implications, then I think front benchers are going to be surprised by how many people will be prepared to speak out under those circumstances,” he says.

“The Labour Party kicked them out of the archipelago. We have, for 60 years, had a stain on our hands about this. We’re finally back in government; we finally have the opportunity to try to make things right. My fear is that, with this agreement with Mauritius, there will never be an opportunity to make right what we made wrong.”

“I've been advised that there are less overt ways of making my point”

On Gaza, Lamb has signed an Early Day Motion put forward by Richard Burgon, who is so Labour left he currently sits as an Independent. In calling for the end of all military exports to Israel, it clearly diverges from the party line.

“Ultimately, there’s a limit to how many half-measures you can deploy. At some point, you have to accept the fact that if Israel do not want to listen to anyone else on human rights questions, then our obligation to supply them with armaments in order to defend themselves doesn’t really exist,” Lamb says. He suspects the International Court of Justice will conclude the Israel attacks amount to genocide.

“We’re sitting in a country that’s free from rocket attacks. It’s very comfortable for us to take that position. I am mindful about that,” he adds. “But at the same time it’s not a very nice government, is it? It’s a highly nationalistic government, and that isn’t something which, as a left-wing political party, we should feel comfortable supporting in terms of their measures.”

Has he been warned by anyone against making these moves in Parliament? “I haven’t been told not to say anything on anything, to be honest. I’ve been advised that there are less overt ways of making my point. But I do write to ministers, and I must say things overtly when I don’t get a response.”

Where Lamb comes across as most impassioned and well-informed is housing policy. The Treasury “don’t remotely understand housing”, he says – its perspective is simply too short-termist. While £500m of additional funding is going into the affordable homes programme, he points out that the amount of council property lost to right to buy amounts to about £300m in Crawley alone.

Lamb believes that housing association properties should be nationalised. (Every MP paying attention to their constituency office will know they produce a significant volume of casework.) He argues this would reverse the stock transfers that occurred when some local authorities handed over their entire council housing stock to associations.

“It was an underhand way of doing away with right to buy,” Lamb explains, as most housing association properties are excluded from the Thatcherite policy. But as a result, many local authorities do not have control over any housing. 

This means their temporary accommodation bill is high: they have to offer hotels and B&Bs to those in need, rather than keep a number of properties empty to shift the homeless around until they find permanent housing. A lack of stock also makes it difficult to increase the supply of social housing.

Lamb says the reason Crawley has been one of the top 10 builders of new council housing is that it already has a large stock of council housing. Simply put, the resulting rental income brings money into the council’s housing revenue account, which is ringfenced – it can only be spent on housing.

Reversing the stock transfer is a bold idea. Will it gain any traction? “It shouldn’t be that radical. These are not profit-making organisations. Can I see it happening? Probably not. But they’re going to have to come up with some solution to those local authorities that don’t currently have their own stock. That’s going to be a big challenge. This is, to the Treasury, the lowest-cost approach to boosting council housing.”

Asked about planning deregulation, Lamb has a very local government perspective: he doesn’t believe it is a magic bullet against the housing crisis.

“We already have 1.5 million planning permissions unused in the system, and it’s going up every year. The easier it gets to get planning permission, the more unused planning permissions you have,” he says. “I’d feel more confident if some of the voices around this had greater experience of how the system operates.”

As Lamb admits, he is outspoken. He tells The House it is because he measures everything against “the baseline”. “What is the baseline level of things that would have happened in my town had I never bothered to enter politics?” he would ask himself as council leader. “How have I moved things above or below the baseline?”

Now he applies it to his parliamentary career. “If, as a minister, all you’re doing is exactly what anyone else would have done, because you don’t want to rock the boat, frankly there’s no point you ever being there in the first place. You get a nice car, that’s nice. But I’m not in this for status.”

Of his veteran MP colleagues who have waited many years for this moment, he says: “They came in 14 years ago, and they’ve been hating every day in opposition and now they get to take decisions, and isn’t that great?

“The problem they’ve got is they sent people off on a mission to try to recruit lots of very capable people to be back bench MPs, some of whom have got subject matter expertise.

“And when that expertise says to them, ‘I’m not sure the person who used to be a parliamentary researcher, who’s now setting government policy as a spad, is necessarily fully appraised of the implications of what they’re proposing’, then there’s a problem.

“Because you either have to bite your tongue, or try to get in and have a meeting with those people. And that’s very difficult, because they’re very busy, and chances are they’re not going to be swayed by a 15-minute conversation with you. Or you have to say something in a more public realm that might actually get listened to.”

We can safely say the new MP has chosen one of these options – and it’s not the one that involves any tongue-biting. 

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