The Foreign Secretary David Lammy says he can find "common ground" with Donald Trump's presidential running mate JD Vance because they are both Christians.
He was speaking despite Vance's controversial comments this week that the UK is the "first truly Islamist country" with nuclear weapons. Senior Labour figures have downplayed the remarks with Lammy saying that he didn't recognise Vance's description of Britain.
Vance is known as an 'America firster' because of his preference to prioritise domestic rather than international issues. He's also told the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that he would not send US soldiers to war abroad unnecessarily. And if Donald Trump wins the election in November the United State's stance on Ukraine may change. Lammy told the BBC that he's been engaged with JD Vance for several months "because he has had strong things to say about European defences, and he has had a point of view about Ukraine."
However, despite political differences, David Lammy told the BBC he regarded him as a friend:
"Let me just say on JD Vance that I’ve met him now on several occasions, we share a similar working class background with addiction issues in our family," he said.
"We’ve written books on that. We’ve talked about that.
“And we’re both Christians so I think I can find common ground with JD Vance.”
Mr Lammy has spoken in the past about how his faith helps him to show compassion and spurs him on to try to build bridges across divides. In his book Tribes he wrote: "I have a deep faith. It’s a faith that has been with me my whole life, and it’s never left; I’ve never doubted that faith. If anything, it’s grown stronger since both my parents have died.
“It’s a very cultural faith. Music has always been a big part of it. Choral traditions, hymns, bells and smells in the Anglo-Catholic sense — all of it speaks to the way in which I connect with God and the spiritual, and it gives me a powerful sense of belonging. It’s definitely a very big component of who I am.”