David Lammy has been doing a lot of thinking. Big thoughts about what is wrong with society and whose fault it is. He’s also clearly been thinking about his own future – although he is more backward about coming forward on that.

Sitting in a hospitality suite of Tottenham Hotspur’s ground in White Hart Lane, in his own north London constituency, our conversation soon turns to leadership styles, and what kind of leader he himself might make.

Lammy is a natural choice for Labour’s next mayoral candidate. Brought up in north London by his Guyanese mother, at 27 he became Britain’s youngest MP after winning the Tottenham by-election following Bernie Grant’s death in 2000. Soon after, he became a minister. But since Labour lost the 2010 election he’s stayed on the backbenches, despite an invitation to join the opposition front bench.

Heavily involved with Ken Livingstone’s unsuccessful mayoral campaign, he’s keen to give credit to Boris Johnson – “a formidable politician with the ability to stand distinct from his party” – rather than put the boot in to Ken. Reminding me that the result was closer than the polls predicted, he is clearly uncomfortable talking about what exactly went wrong.

Familiarity breeds contempt seems to be his main conclusion about Livingstone: “Not a lot of voters were changing their analysis of Ken,” he says. “Some love him but others have had enough of him.” Leading us neatly to the matter in hand: will he run in the next mayoral election?

“I’m not immune to what people are saying,” he says. “Let’s see where we get to…” is as far as he’ll go. Which is about as near to a “yes” as you’ll ever get from a politician.

And he clearly has given it plenty of thought. He ponders: “How could the mayor maintain a united London when its constituent parts are so diverse and different?”

 

Lammy the leader

And his own leadership style? He trots out the politician’s favourite: “I’ve always tried to say what’s right rather than what’s popular.” But if you look at his track record it holds up better than most. Last year he took on Spurs chairman Daniel Levy when he proposed moving the ground to the Olympic Stadium, accusing him of thinking the club was “too posh for Tottenham” and treating fans with contempt. “That’s my job,” says Lammy. “I don’t surround myself with yesmen, but with people who challenge me and tell me when they think I’ve got something wrong, but who are very loyal to me.”

And last year, after the riots left Tottenham and its people devastated, he said working-class parents were confused about whether they could smack their children to deter them from joining gangs and getting involved in knife crime. That took guts.

“Parenting in Britain in 2012 is tough,” he tells me. “It’s tougher than it’s been for a long while. Society is changing fast.” He adds that raising a child to independence is the primary role of parenting. That child’s primary socialisation traditionally came from mum and dad and, secondarily, from school. However, that is no longer the case, argues Lammy.

He says the endless media onslaught – Twitter, hundreds of television stations, BlackBerry Messenger, the internet, MTV Base, Grand Theft Auto and other computer games, “big brands coming into your home,” he could go on and on – puts even more pressure on children, pressure that is too intense and too much for them, their school or even their parents to deal with.

 

Home turf

For some of his constituents the problem is even more acute. Lammy paints me a picture of a typical working-class family in Tottenham: “Two parents, dad is a minicab driver during the day and a security guard at night. Mum is a dinner lady by day and a cleaner at night. These are people who haven’t got the hours in the day to be a family.

“We’re living at a time when some of the values of big business, some of the things advertisers want to push, come into the family home through internet or television. It can be spend, spend, spend or buy, buy, buy, or pressures on women on how to look, pressures on boys to be misogynistic or violent through video games. All of that is a lot of choice. It’s a burden on young people and on their families to help them make the right choice. For the poorest families, the parents often aren’t there, while middle-class families can use their resources to mitigate and filter against it.”

He goes on to say that in communities where one parent is the norm “that parent is up against it even more”.

Fatherhood is a matter close to Lammy’s heart. He was raised by a single mother and he is chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood. “The notion of a ‘baby father’ goes back to slavery in the Caribbean and the US,” he tells me, “where the men, as slaves, could be moved from plantation to plantation and yes, might father a child, but had no responsibility for that child because they were the responsibility of the landowner. That has now become culturally imbued in some parts of the black community.

In some parts of the world there are large, extended families to look after children, so the idea of a baby father might still work, but it certainly doesn’t work in urban London.” In the end he says it doesn’t have to be this way: “What you see is too many young boys looking for their masculinity in peer groups, gangs and, by fathering children, the cycle continues.”

(Our feature “The trouble with boys” also touches on issues of underperformance in young males.)

Fixing that, he says, starts with acknowledging that this is the issue. Lammy thinks the “penny is dropping” in some communities, that you can’t be imprisoned by your past. He says the starting point is to assert that a child is better off if their father is engaged in their life, even if the relationship breaks down. And those fathers need support from their family, their local authority and even the government, he says.

But surely those young men can only be helped to be better fathers if they want to be better fathers? Lammy disagrees, saying if you get hostility when you intervene, you can often bring people round to thinking about this issue. The bottom line, he believes, is that most parents care about their children and are willing to reexamine their parenting.

And all that bad parenting brings us back to the riots, a subject he’s spoken about extensively and even written a book on – Out of the Ashes: Britain after the riots – but he says it’s not simply parenting that was to blame.

So while he rejects the phrase “feral underclass” – saying, “feral should be for describing rodents, not people. And underclass sounds like some terrible caste system” – he believes that some British council estates have gone from being working-class communities, such as the one where he grew up in Tottenham, to “workless communities”.

 

Mayoral manifesto

Structural unemployment was here before the recession, but has been exacerbated by the downturn and that means, he says, there are now young people and their parents for whom there is no work, either because there really are no jobs or because they don’t have the skills to do what work there is.

“That is a profound issue for Britain and an issue about growth and the nature of our economy, and that is why I believe that government needs to do more to subsidise work,” he says. “It’s not just about productivity. It cuts to the heart of the kind of country Britain wants to be.”

If you have young people who don’t get accustomed to getting up and going to work, the effects will be huge, he adds. “It’s catastrophic for character, dignity and self-worth.”

The issues that were at the heart of the riots – housing estates that aren’t fit for purpose, worklessness, low wages, parental responsibility – are issues we need to tackle as a priority, says Lammy. All of this sounds like a mayoral manifesto. And we’re back to leadership, which he believes requires “persuasion, tenacity and being robust, alongside a degree of charm and skill”.

So who is the best leader he’s come across? “Tony Blair was someone I could do business with,” he says. “I was happy to be part of his team.”

And Gordon Brown? “Leadership takes cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence,” he says, “the ability to delegate and work, to distinguish between leadership and management. The best leaders have them all. Weak leaders may have one or two, but not all of them.”

And in that answer he demonstrates that he has the ability to answer a tricky question with honesty, without getting himself into a whole heap of trouble. And that, I think, is another very useful skill for a leader – and leader-in-waiting – to have.