Six weeks ago, the Conservatives’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, was revealed by the Guardian to have spoken at a meeting of his healthcare company, the Phoenix Partnership, about one of Britain’s longest-serving and most pioneering MPs. “You see Diane Abbott on the TV and … you just want to hate all black women,” Hester said. “I think she should be shot.”
The meeting had taken place in 2019, when Abbott was Labour’s shadow home secretary. As a lifelong defender of civil liberties, a radical leftwinger and a close ally of the then party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Abbott was notably different from previous holders of the role. But there was an anger and viciousness to Hester’s remarks, which are being investigated by the police, and also a limit to the Labour support for her that they prompted, which was very striking.
On the one hand, Abbott was widely defended against the obvious racism and misogyny – including by many in the party who usually differ with her. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said: “Those comments about Diane Abbott are just abhorrent.” He went on to remind the media and voters of her importance: “Diane has been a trailblazer. She has paved the way for others.”
Yet despite such expressions of sympathy and respect, she was not readmitted to the parliamentary Labour party, from which she had been suspended last year, after writing a letter to the Observer seen by many as antisemitic. In divisive times, she is still one of our most loathed and admired politicians.
Abbott was Britain’s first black female MP. Yet despite being elected 37 years ago, and steadily increasing her majority until it has become one of the largest in the country, her local and national status remains in some ways unresolved. I’ve lived in her constituency, Hackney North and Stoke Newington, in north-east London, on and off since 1994, and even here I am often told by Labour voters and sometimes members of the local party that she is prickly, self-absorbed, unreliable and difficult to work with. Like Corbyn, and like one of his and her Labour heroes, the late Tony Benn, she inspires and she enrages. In a party that is often cautious, she is part of a bolder, more heretical Labour tradition – a tradition that is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and needs to be better examined.
Abbott began to make a political name for herself in the early 1980s, as a prominent member of the new Labour Black Sections campaign. In a white-dominated party, the campaign tried to persuade a highly resistant leadership to let black members set up their own organisations inside Labour, and also to select black parliamentary candidates. Despite postwar immigration, between 1929 and 1983 no British party had had a black or Asian MP.
Hackney North seemed an obvious place for a black Labour candidate: almost 40% of its voters were non-white, and it had been held by the party since its creation in 1950. In 1985, after failing to be selected for other, similar seats, Abbott was persuaded to try one more time. For months, Black Sections campaigners and sympathetic white activists worked through the constituency, ward by ward, persuading Labour members to put down and pass motions saying the party needed a black candidate.
The problem was, Labour already had a feasible candidate: the sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, a former communist in his early 70s – 40 years older than Abbott – who was widely respected for campaigning against racism and nuclear weapons. Abbott also saw another, more fundamental obstacle. In the eyes of many white leftists, she told me, “black women are never left enough. The big leftwing figures in Britain in the 80s were all white men: Benn, [Ken] Livingstone, [Arthur] Scargill.” It was difficult for many Labour activists to imagine a black woman joining this socialist elite, and that had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Abbott campaigned hard for the candidacy, but she did not expect to win.
More than 100 people, an unusually large number, came to the decisive selection meeting in the art deco council chamber of Hackney town hall. In her speech to the gathering, Abbott shrewdly made both a practical and philosophical argument. She promised to live in the seat if she became its MP, and to open a constituency office. Roberts had done neither. She also argued that choosing her would be a vote for Hackney’s multicultural reality, rather than its past as a partly industrial inner suburb arranged primarily for white men. “I could see people listening, agonising,” she remembered, “because they had been mandated to vote for Roberts, but now knew they had to vote for me.”
Roberts got 35 votes: a solid result. But Abbott got 42. “The [local] Labour officials there looked gutted,” she told me. Yet she was elated, and so were people far beyond Hackney. The headline in the Caribbean diaspora newspaper West Indian World was: “Di does it”.
For months afterwards Roberts claimed that Abbott’s win was illegitimate because party members mandated to vote for him had acted otherwise. The claim was baseless: Labour rules allowed members to decide for themselves in selection contests. But for rightwing newspapers, the chance to allege a leftwing plot, while also weaponising her blackness, was irresistible. “Black Diane ‘won after vote swap’,” said the Sun.
Abbott found the abrupt changes in how she was seen by the media and some in her own party simultaneously ridiculous, dizzying, frustrating and intimidating. “Until I became a parliamentary candidate, I wasn’t leftwing enough,” she told me. “Once I won the selection, I was an extremist.” Her monstering had begun, before she had even stood for parliament.
When she did so, at the 1987 general election, the process was as bruising and exhilarating as the selection battle, but on a bigger scale. Her Conservative opponent was Oliver Letwin, then a young Thatcherite. Despite having been educated at Eton, he presented himself as a charming underdog to the many journalists who visited the constituency, while accusing Abbott of being, the Times reported, “a revolutionary with no genuine allegiance to British parliamentary democracy”.
The Hackney campaign was unusually confrontational. On 3 June, eight days before the election, the Conservative campaign office was firebombed. The Tory chairman, Norman Tebbit, rushed to Hackney and insinuated that the arson might have been the doing of “the extreme left”. Abbott’s own campaign office had its glass front smashed. The constituency was full of far-right, far-left and anarchist groups that might have been responsible for these attacks, yet no one was arrested.
The racist National Front protested in the constituency against Abbott’s candidacy. Senior Labour figures stayed away from her campaign, while some local white activists would not canvass for her. Abbott’s response was to emphasise rather than play down her identity. She had campaign posters and leaflets designed that were dominated by her photo rather than the Labour logo.
Shortly before polling day, she agreed to be interviewed by the New York Times, even though its readership was irrelevant to the contest. She met the reporter not in Hackney but miles away, in the River room of the Savoy hotel, one of the swankiest dining spaces in London, which she had never been to before. Dressed in bright, socialist red, she ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu. She talked about her admiration for black American iconoclasts such as Angela Davis and Malcolm X, and said that, after “a time lag”, black British politics was about to undergo a similar upsurge. Continuing in a very confident future tense, she added: “I’ll be representing a strong anti-racist, anti-fascist district, an old immigrant stronghold.”
On election day, she was nervous. The result was declared at 3am. By then it was becoming clear that Margaret Thatcher was going to win her third consecutive election, and by another landslide. But in the packed room where Abbott made her victory speech, that was all momentarily forgotten. She wore bright red again, with pearls, and her hair in long braids. She was not going to fit in with previous notions about how an MP should dress. After a big intake of breath, she spoke in a very loud voice. “I have come a long way to stand here before you tonight,” she said. “And I am aware that a lot of hope, not just in Hackney, but across the country, rides on our victory tonight. I hope and believe that I can fulfil those hopes.”
As an MP, however, Abbott would spend more than a quarter of a century struggling to access power in the Labour party. Like others on the left, she found parliament a difficult place to convert her public profile into political gains. But the inhospitality she faced there was deeper, as she discovered from the start.
For months after arriving in the Commons, she was not given a parliamentary office. Many Palace of Westminster staff simply refused to believe that she and the three other black or Asian MPs elected in 1987 – Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz – were MPs at all. They had hardly arrived in the Commons as unknown figures: their election campaigns and victories had got plenty of media attention. Still in her early 30s, Abbott was suddenly one of the most famous young women in the country. Yet in parliament, she and the other three non-white MPs were often stopped by security staff and other attendants, asked what they were doing in the building, and told to identify themselves. Sometimes, they were manhandled. Black and Asian constituents whom the MPs invited to visit them in the Commons often got the same treatment.
“In those days, all the Commons staff were white,” Abbott told me. “Even the catering staff were white. Black MPs provoked fear and hostility.” Her gender singled her out further: “I was the only black woman in parliament for 10 years.” Even MPs from her own party often treated her as an alien. “I was in the queue in the Commons tea room behind another Labour MP. Trying to chat to him, I said: ‘Where are you going for Christmas?’ He said somewhere in the north of England. When he asked where I was going, I said: ‘Jamaica.’
“And he said: ‘Do they celebrate Christmas in Jamaica?’”
She was used to operating in white environments, but in the Commons the scrutiny was even more intense than usual. She tried to tune it out: “Life had taught me, you just had to get on with things. If you allow yourself to be derailed by racism, you won’t do anything.” At times, she turned the long history of prejudice in the Commons back against the racists. At the official opening of parliament after the 1987 election, she deliberately sat in the spot on the opposition benches that had once been habitually occupied by Enoch Powell.
A few white MPs tried to make her feel she belonged. “Jeremy [Corbyn] was very supportive,” she recalled. While others kept their distance, he sat with Abbott, Grant, Boateng and Vaz in the Commons. Tony Banks, a more flamboyant leftwing MP, took her to the Smoking Room, a Commons bar long associated with Conservative MPs and boozy machismo, on her very first day. Pointedly, he bought her a bottle of champagne.
Support also came from outside parliament, from black people and others not just in her constituency but all over the country. As she had acknowledged on election night, “a lot of hope” had been invested in her. With this hope came demands. There were thousands of letters, telephone calls, requests for meetings, requests for her to intervene in people’s troubles, to take a stand on race-related issues. She and the three other black and Asian MPs were expected to act as role models and to clear the way for others to follow. At times, the burden of all these roles was too much. Often during the first few months after being elected, Abbott said later, she was in a kind of daze. “She used to ring me up all the time,” an old ally of hers from the Labour Black Sections movement told me. “She was quite needy.”
The media continued to regard Abbott with a mixture of fascination and hostility. For women’s magazines, softer television interview programmes and newspapers read by the Jamaican diaspora such as the Gleaner, she was a pioneer to be praised and defended. Meanwhile, for some Tory journalists she was either an exotic novelty or an extremist, rather than just a modern Londoner. In November 1987, Colin Welch wrote leeringly and mock-seriously: “It’s illegal to call her dusky or alluring.” The day after she won Hackney North, a leading article in the Times warned that “the far left” had “chalked up considerable gains” in the election, citing wins by Bernie Grant, Ken Livingstone and Diane Abbott – “all extremists [who] stand between the Labour party and any prospect of a Labour government”. The next day, another Times leader described the Labour MPs as “ambitious demagogues claiming to represent blacks, homosexuals, women and so on”. The newspaper declared that Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, “must … expel them”.
A week after being elected, Abbott appeared on BBC One’s Question Time. One of the other panellists was Cyril Smith, a Liberal MP then generally seen as a jolly, harmless figure, though after his death revealed to be a prolific child abuser. Smith argued that one of the reasons for Labour’s unpopularity was “Diane Abbott and people like her”. When the applause from the studio audience had died down, Abbott responded. “If Mr Smith believes that having black people in parliament for the first time is in some sense a backward step,” she said, “thousands of people that voted for me in Hackney North would disagree.” As she was speaking, an angry murmur rose from the audience, almost loud enough to drown her out. Whether the anger was at her accusation of racism, or was an expression of racism, or a combination of the two, it was impossible to tell. But the whiteness of the audience and the nasty atmosphere that had suddenly filled the studio were undeniable. For some people, from the very start of her parliamentary career, Abbott’s presence was seemingly intolerable.
In her constituency there were other perils. As well as racists, she received threats from black separatists who believed she should not work with white MPs. More mildly, the establishment image of the Commons meant that “a lot of people in the black community said to me: ‘You’ve sold out.’” Others expected her to help solve poisonous local problems such as the culture of Stoke Newington police station, which had become notorious for deaths in custody, usually of young black men. The constituency’s mazy streets and hidden yards also housed black, white and Turkish gangs; IRA cells planning London attacks; and many leftwing purists who continued to see her as insufficiently socialist – the usurper of, and inadequate replacement for, the still revered Ernie Roberts. Some of these disgruntled activists wanted to deselect her. As a new MP with a decent but not huge majority, she quickly became aware of these dangerous currents and of her position’s general precariousness. “If you live in Hackney,” she said in 1997, “the question is: ‘Are you paranoid or are they out to get you?’”
Reducing local violent crime became one of her preoccupations. “Sometimes, it took a lot of courage,” said Keith Veness, who worked with her in the constituency for decades as a Labour activist and general fixer. “We had one meeting with predominantly older black women. Diane said to them, ‘If your son comes home with a gun, report it.’ None of the women said anything. They all just looked round the room.”
During the 1990s, parts of her constituency became more gentrified. Abbott’s local status gradually changed as well. At the 1992 election, she increased her majority by more than a third, to more than 10,000, and at the 1997 election she increased it again, to more than 15,000. She could lack tact and patience with constituents, but she was admired for her path-breaking, for her resilience against racists and other enemies, and for speaking her mind.
She showed little deference towards Labour’s leaders. In 1996, when Tony Blair was at the peak of his prestige as prime minister-in-waiting, Labour backbenchers were summoned in groups to see him. Abbott was supposed to be in a group with Chris Mullin, another leftwinger who, unlike her, was becoming more respectful towards New Labour. Mullin recorded in his diaries that Abbott “waltzed in” to the meeting with Blair “20 minutes late”. She then told him that New Labour made people feel “talked at rather than listened to”. As a result, she went on, the party was “losing sight of those who traditionally voted for us”, leftwing people and the working class.
When Labour won power the following year with a crushing majority, Abbott’s warning, like similar ones from Livingstone, Benn and Corbyn during the mid-1990s, seemed hopelessly off the mark. Yet Abbott was not totally wrong about New Labour, just premature. Over the next three general elections, under Blair and then Gordon Brown, the party shed almost 5 million voters – more than a third of its 1997 total – and ended up almost back where it had been in the early 80s, at least in electoral terms. At the 2010 election, as in 1983, Labour would spend much of the campaign trying to avoid coming third.
During New Labour’s long decline, Abbott’s own majority, despite her distance from Blair and Brown, also fell. Hackney voters were meant to admire dissenters; but they did not give her much credit, it appeared, for being one of parliament’s most frequent rebels. What credit she did receive did not outweigh the apathy and alienation that many voters came to feel about New Labour. The same forces eroded Corbyn’s majority too, in his next-door constituency, Islington North. Under a Labour government, as under a Conservative one, the wilderness in which the left was trapped seemed to go on and on.
Diane Abbott’s reputation remains unsettled. During her almost four decades in parliament, she has received more hate mail than any other female MP. In the six weeks leading up to the 2017 election, a period in which she was particularly prominent as a Corbyn ally and shadow minister, she received almost half of all abusive tweets directed at female MPs, according to research commissioned by Amnesty International. A week after the election, she revealed that she had recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, symptoms of which include blurred vision and constant tiredness – debilitating for anyone, but particularly so for a politician, with their need to absorb information quickly and get through days of public engagements. More often than most MPs, she has regularly been accused of not knowing essential facts and of being lazy.
After losing her chance to be a radically different kind of home secretary, thanks to Labour’s defeat at the 2019 election, she has just carried on: calling out racism and threats to civil liberties, making lawyerly interventions in the Commons and blunter ones on social media, criticising Starmer much as she used to criticise Blair, for being too intolerant of dissent and not paying enough attention, as she piously but accurately puts it, “to ordinary Labour supporters and ordinary trade unionists”.
In Hackney, she is still a distinctive presence, nearly always dressed up, a little remote, walking along some streets that have gentrified almost beyond recognition since 1987, and others that are as full as ever of desperate situations awaiting her intervention. Despite all the threats and abuse against her, she rarely uses a security escort. As well as her value as a role model, her political survival alone is a kind of success, as all the rage from racists at her continued high profile unintentionally acknowledges. After the 2019 election, there were 66 MPs from minority ethnic backgrounds – still a disproportionately low number, but a 16-fold increase on when she was first elected.
Last year she made her political life that much harder. In April, research was published about the experience of racism in Britain during the pandemic. The Observer newspaper highlighted a finding that a greater or similar proportion of Britons who identified as Jewish, Traveller or Irish said they had experienced racism compared to most groups of black or Asian heritage, among them people identifying as black Caribbean.
Soon afterwards, the paper published a letter from Abbott. “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people … undoubtedly experience prejudice,” she said. “This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable. It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”
The letter attempted to raise important questions, but did so insensitively and clumsily. Her comments were widely seen as offensive, particularly after Corbyn’s leadership had been overshadowed for years by complaints of antisemitism within the Labour party. Abbott apologised, saying the letter contained “errors [which] arose in an initial draft being sent”. She was suspended from the parliamentary Labour party, and an inquiry was launched into the episode.
Six months later, in October 2023, we met at her Westminster office. Officially, the inquiry was ongoing – which remains the situation now – despite her letter being only two paragraphs long. “I’m under no illusions about what’s going to happen to me,” Abbott said, with a level voice and a neutral expression. She was sitting at her small desk in one of the more remote corners of the parliamentary annexe Portcullis House, far from the offices of Starmer and his entourage.
With the coolness she often shows in public, at first Abbott kept her chair facing the desk, and turned to look at me slightly side on. “Even before the letter,” she continued, “there were rumours going round my constituency that I wasn’t going to be allowed to stand again.” She believed that Starmer had “pre-judged” the investigation. The day after the letter’s publication, and the day after the party had announced its inquiry, he had publicly commented: “In my view what she said was to be condemned, it was antisemitic.”
From that moment, Abbott told me, she had doubted that the investigation would recommend anything other than the most severe punishment: “No one’s readmitting me, or Jeremy, to the party.” And then, “They” – she meant the party – “will wait until the very last moment before the election, and then impose somebody as their candidate in Hackney.”
Did she have any regrets about the letter? “Maybe I could have worded it better.” She said her Jewish constituents were still “fine” with her being their MP. “I’ve spent 36 years fighting antisemitism,” she said.
Her modest office was crammed with papers and files in purposeful piles. It did not look like the office of a politician who had given up. “People are saying, ‘You should run as an independent,’” she said. But then she quickly added: “I wouldn’t want to do that. And I’m not sure that Jeremy wants to do that, either. He’s torn … He’s a Labour person. He’s always been a Labour person … I’m a bit like that.” As for Tony Benn before them, the party was both a vehicle and an obstacle, hostile environment and home.
I asked what her plans were. “I’ll stay an MP for as long as I possibly can.” She was sitting facing me properly now, and her manner was warmer, more expansive. Through a window behind her, the autumn sun flared and faded over Westminster rooftops, and we talked for a while about how all political careers were finite; and about how conventional politicians and political journalists underestimated the importance of dissidents simply being there, in parliament, representing and inspiring people that conventional politics usually did not care much about – and sometimes also changing society itself.
Then she went quiet, and nodded at a faded set of photos on a windowsill across the room. “Look, there’s the four of us,” she said. The pictures were from a few weeks after the 1987 election: small portraits of her, Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz and Paul Boateng, the quartet of pioneering black and Asian MPs.
Grant died in 2000. Vaz stood down as an MP in 2019, after a sex and drugs scandal. Boateng became a lord in 2010, after moving rightwards and enjoying a substantial ministerial career in the Blair government, including becoming the first black cabinet minister. Yet Abbott gave me no sense that she envied Boateng. Instead she said with satisfaction: “I’m the last one left standing.”
This is an edited and updated extract from The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain and Their Many Enemies, published by Allen Lane on 2 May