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Donald Trump is not a warmonger and most people in the world are glad he is back in power, David Lammy said ahead of his inauguration on Monday.
Going out of his way to praise the new president, the Foreign Secretary called him “gracious and generous”.
Mr Lammy, who has been fiercely critical of Mr Trump in the past, said Britain had to come to terms with dealing with him.
“You meet the world as it is – not as you would like it to be,” he told the BBC.
Global support for Trump was rooted in the view that he would curb “malign authoritarian” leaders by “keeping them guessing,” said Mr Lammy.
He said he had been impressed when he dined with Trump in September last year.
“This is not a man who is in any sense a warmonger. In reckoning with the world’s most malign interests he was very clear – he wanted to be strong and powerful but he is not embracing war.
“The Donald Trump I met was a man who had incredible grace, generosity, he was very keen to be a good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the UK, our Royal Family, Scotland.”
The British Government’s approach to the Trump administration “had to be progressive realism- you meet the world as it is not you would like it to be”.
Mr Lammy’s comments are in striking contrast to remarks he has made about Trump in the past, when he called him a “tyrant in a toupee – a woman hating neo Nazi sympathising sociopath”.
Speaking on Monday he said a survey had shown “70 per cent of the world welcomed Trump coming to power”.
Many of those people were “worried about authoritarian actors (and) quite liked the fact that Donald Trump keeps them guessing”.
“We have to reckon with the fact that 77 million Americans voted for him – including Afro Americans, Latinos and many young people.
“We have to reckon with that truth.”
Mr Lammy said it was right to allow Mr Trump to be consulted on the UK’s deal to hand over the Chagos Islands, where there is a joint US-UK military base, to Mauritius.
But he expected the agreement would go ahead because it was “the right deal to keep the global community safe”. “I would say that this has been through an inter-agency process in the United States and I suspect he will come to the same conclusions as the last administration,” Mr Lammy added.
Mr Lammy described Mr Trump as “a revisionist actor – he wants to change the rules of the game”.
As an example he said he believed Mr Trump would revive the proposed Israel-Saudi Arabia accord, which was abandoned after the Israel-Hamas war. That could only be done if there was also progress on achieving a two state solution on Israel and Palestine.
And he confirmed Sir Keir Starmer will visit Washington for talks with Mr Trump within weeks.
The foreign secretary said: “I think that when you look at past prime ministers, it’s taken between a week or up to a month to come to Washington. The importance is the strength of the relationship and the serious discussions that we have.
“In the end, we have war in Europe, we have a ceasefire in the Middle East, but it’s incredibly fragile, and there are important malign actors like Iran that we’ve got to discuss with the United States and, of course, our growing trade relations with the United States.
“So, lots to discuss, and I’m very confident that Keir Starmer will be discussing this with Donald Trump within the next few weeks.”
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