In Diane Abbott’s Westminster office, alongside a picture of her with Jesse Jackson and the framed front page of The Voice from 1987 declaring “A New Era” with a picture of Abbott, Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz – the four newly elected Black MPs – there are a number of large empty packing boxes. Abbott points at them and laughs. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother. But when they called the election we didn’t know whether I would be allowed to stand, so I had to get ready just in case,” she says.
It has been a heady few months for Abbott. So much so, in fact, that the memoir she has written, A Woman Like Me, is already out of date. It includes the story about Tory donor Frank Hester, who had said Abbott made him “want to hate all Black women” and that she “should be shot”, which happened in March. “At first I couldn’t take in his words,” she writes. “It was a clear incitement to violence.” But the book was finished and at the printers before her intense battle with the Labour leadership to keep her seat and her consequent elevation to mother of the House, the honorific title bestowed on the female MP with the longest uninterrupted service.
The way Abbott tells it, for several months going back to last year, she came under significant pressure to do a deal with the Labour leadership to stand down after she had the Labour whip removed for writing an appalling letter to the Observer which, among other things, compared being Jewish, a Traveller or Irish to having red hair. “The deal was that they would restore the whip and then literally that day, within hours, I would stand down,” she says. “Not the same week. The same day. And then maybe I could go to the Lords.”
Abbott would not agree for several reasons. First, she felt it so smacked of a deal that people might think she had sold her constituency, one of Labour’s safest seats, to salvage her reputation. Second, she didn’t want to go to the Lords. “The thing about the Lords is that it’s full of people you thought had died,” she says. “You should never say never, but it’s never appealed to me. I’ve got a couple of friends there. But the people who go from the House of Commons to the House of Lords usually do so because they can’t let go of the status. And the status has never been my thing.”
But mostly she refused because she felt that the whole arrangement was designed to belittle her. “My humiliation was their intent. That’s why I wouldn’t agree to it. They thought there was political gain in it. Keir Starmer had kept saying, ‘It’s a new party, it’s a new party.’ If it’s a new party, then what could be more emblematic than getting rid of Diane Abbott. People tried to tell them to leave it. But they were insistent.”
The leadership had already removed the whip from the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn: Abbott was the next logical target. But Corbyn and Abbott, while longtime political bedfellows and, at one time, actual bedfellows (they had a relationship), do not have the same currency. Labour misjudged the symbolic resonance of her historic role as the first Black female MP, the optics of bullying a Black woman out of her job and the popular support she had in the Black community and beyond. “I think they didn’t understand how much resistance there would be to that because a lot of the people around Starmer are these young guys and have no sense of the history.”
When the election was called, the question mark over her future and mistreatment dominated the news, forcing Labour to postpone key announcements. Demonstrations of support in her Hackney constituency drew large numbers. “I held out and held out, and it was a question of who blinked first. And they blinked first. You don’t become Britain’s first Black woman MP because you give in to being pushed around like that.”
Abbott relates this story quite dispassionately: a vexing tale of defiance and gamesmanship, enunciated slowly and deliberately. It’s as if she tastes her words before she shares them, in mellifluent tones, with such regal hauteur that it is difficult to imagine she was born and raised in the same area of London as RMT union leader Mick Lynch. Dressed all in blue, from her trainers to her headscarf, at 70 Abbott strikes a diminutive but by no means diminished figure. But when she brings her cup of tea to her lips, her left hand holds the right steady, to limit the shakes. She has diabetes and though she does not mention it the whole interview, she has been quite ill for some time.
The paradox is that if Labour had treated her more respectfully, she might have bowed out of her own accord. They knew this but insisted on the deal anyway. In the book she says she had wanted to stand down in 2017 but thought it would reflect badly on Corbyn. Seven years on, I ask her if everything else was equal, she might have stood down this time.
She pauses. “I might have. But what I wasn’t going to do was have them push me out. I would stand down when I was ready.”
At the opening of parliament, in his first prime ministerial speech, Starmer singled out Abbott for praise. Referring to diversity in the House he paid “tribute to the new mother of the House … who has done so much in her career over so many years to fight for a parliament that truly represents modern Britain.”
Would the next insult, I ask, not be to elevate her to the status of “national treasure”? She smiles. “Having spent 37 years in parliament not being a national treasure, I think it’s a bit too late for that. And there are things to talk about.”
Her boss is not one of them. More than once during the interview she steps back from what might be a scathing comment about the Labour leader, saying, “It’s too early to criticise Starmer directly.”
Uncharacteristically restrained in person, she is not particularly flattering about him in the book, where she describes his performance in Brussels in opposition as being “reminiscent of the Brit abroad who talks loudly in English so that the silly foreigner can understand.”
Abbott is unapologetic. “What people forget about Keir Starmer is he hasn’t been in the party very long. So though we were in the shadow cabinet at the same time under Jeremy, he’s not somebody I know, in the way I know, say, Harriet Harman. We’re not best friends or anything, but I’ve known her for a long time. There’s a history. There’s no way I’d know him in that way because he’s not been around the movement in that way.”
Abbott rose through the party, first as a councillor in Paddington, London, and as a supporter of Labour Party Black Sections, a group within the party, started in the early 80s, that called for greater Black representation and an affiliated society for non-white members modelled on women-only sections. The demand was opposed by the leadership and championed by the left at a time when there was significant racial tension and had not been an ethnic minority MP for over half a century.
“Race and feminism were the two main strands of my politics. And it seemed the Labour party was potentially a way of progressing those issues. It wasn’t the most obvious choice if you considered yourself a radical Black person, even then. And remember this was during the ascendancy of Tony Benn. So the idea you could move the party leftwards, it seemed within reach.”
From the book one gets the impression she no longer thinks this is the case. She describes Corbyn’s era of leadership as an “interlude [that] tested to destruction the idea that the left will be allowed significant influence in the Labour party any time soon”.
Among the many regional variations that formed the background to Labour’s victory in 2024 is the fact that in the major cities, where ethnic minorities tend to live, there was a significant collapse in turnout and the Labour vote. (In Abbott’s constituency turnout fell by 15.5% and Labour’s vote share dropped by 10%.) According to Focaldata, Labour still won more minority votes than any other party by quite a distance, but it was down 13 points among Asian voters and six points among Black voters to the lowest level of minority support for Labour since minority polling began.
“For a long time Labour essentially had a client relationship with minority communities,” Abbott says. “But different generations have come through and a lot of them think, ‘What is this? I’m not your faithful follower.’ The younger generations are more sceptical and I think Labour are in danger, and have been for some time, in taking them for granted.”
If she no longer sees Labour as a vehicle for the kind of change she wants to see, why stay in it?
“During that whole period when they had withdrawn the whip, people were encouraging me to run as an independent, but I didn’t want to do that. I hinted that I might to upset them. But I never intended to. I’m a Labour party person. Not this particular version of Labour. But I’ve been in the party for 45 years. If they wanted to ban me, well, that was up to them. But I wasn’t going to leave.”
So if she had her time again, would she join the Labour party now? A long sigh is followed by an even longer pause. “I wouldn’t want to say.” When I ask if she thinks Labour have learned the lessons of this last election, her response is quick and brief. “No.”
Abbott was born in Paddington in 1953 – five years after HMS Windrush docked, marking the symbolic start of postwar, post-colonial migration, and five years before the racist pogroms that swept through Notting Hill in London and St Ann’s in Nottingham.
“1958 was a big moment,” the late Jamaica-born academic Stuart Hall once told me. “Before that, individuals had endured discrimination. But in that year racism became a mass, collective experience that went beyond that.”
This summer’s wave of social unrest was another big moment, which Abbott describes as shocking but not surprising when we speak again a few weeks after our Westminster meeting. “With racism there’s always an undercurrent of violence,” she says. “But it was striking how most politicians wanted to describe them as thugs, as though it was just random violence. It wasn’t random. It was racial violence. You didn’t need to be a political scientist to work that out. They attacked mosques, Black people and asylum seekers’ hostels. My concern now is that [ministers] pivot to draconian anti-immigration legislation to address ‘the root causes of the violence’. But the root cause wasn’t immigrants. It was racism.”
Abbott’s parents, among the earlier postwar migrants, came from Jamaica. Her mother, Julia, who became a nurse after she could not become a teacher in the UK, docked in Bristol in 1950. Her father, Reginald, a machine operator who became a sheet-metal worker, arrived about the same time.
“People get sentimental about Windrush,” Abbott says. “Our parents are all national treasures now. But they left rural Jamaica in the 50s and 60s to come to Britain and it took a lot of courage and resilience to survive that. The racism was brutal. There was no race relations legislation. People could literally not employ you because you were Black and there was nothing you could do. My parents never spoke about racism. They just put one foot in front of the other and kept going.”
If Black migrants were relatively rare, Black babies were even more so. While her mother was in hospital, recovering from the birth, she had to stop nurses and doctors coming to lift up the blankets and take a peek at Diane. “No, please,” she told them. “She’s not a doll.”
Her father bought a house in Paddington and rented out all the rooms bar one, where they lived, with the cooker on the landing. In the basement was an Irish family, headed by Uncle Jimmy, who took a shine to Diane. One day in the 50s, as her mother tells it, teddy boys came down the road banging on the door and attacking any Black person who answered. As they approached her home, Jimmy came up declaring, “They’re not going to get our Diane.” When they opened the door, the teddy boys thought he owned the house and moved on. (A story that illustrates the point she was trying to make about being a visible minority in her Observer letter, without excusing what she actually wrote.)
That experience of being what TV super producer Shonda Rhimes refers to in her autobiography as “FOD – first, only and different” has persisted all her life. “I went to Harrow county grammar school for girls, where I was the only Black girl … Then Newnham College, Cambridge, where there was a mixed-race girl and a south Asian girl. After Newnham I was a graduate trainee at the Home Office and again I was the first and only one at that level. Then I went to the National Council for Civil Liberties and I think I must have been the first Black person they ever employed. Then I went to work in television and I was the only Black person there.”
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So when she entered parliament in 1987, being the first and only Black woman was more of a novelty for Britain than it was for her. “From my schooldays I was in institutions where I was the only Black person, so when I came here that was what my whole working life had been up until that point.”
That took nothing away from the moment itself. With some pride, Abbott asks her assistant to pull up a picture of silver-haired Lord David Pitt, a Grenada-born Labour politician who unsuccessfully stood for parliament in the 50s and 70s before going into the House of Lords, throwing his arms around her on her first day.
African American novelist and essayist James Baldwin coined the term “the burden of representation” about the pressure brought to bear on the “first and only” minorities who make it to use whatever influence they have to reflect and respond to the interests of the communities from which they come. The fate of the second may arguably hang on the success of the first.
Abbott, who remained the only Black female MP for 10 years after her election, says she was aware of that pressure but never felt constrained by it. “I never consciously saw it as a burden. I knew people would be going after me. But if you stop and say, ‘What a burden,’ then you might as well give up. I was conscious that I was maybe being judged by harsher standards. But it’s one of the things I learned from my parents: to just put one foot in front of the other and keep going.”
But everyone stumbles sometimes. Her letter to the Observer, which she apologised for unreservedly the same day, was not her first mistake. In 2012 during a Twitter exchange, she was forced to apologise after writing: “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game #tacticasoldascolonialism.”
During an LBC interview in the 2017 election as shadow home secretary, she first referred to Labour plans for an extra 10,000 police officers costing £300,000, then corrected herself to say it would in fact cost £80m, only to eventually clarify the actual figure, which was closer to £300m. It was bad.
Compared with, say, Boris Johnson conspiring to have a journalist beaten up, being fired for plagiarism, lying about an affair, reciting a colonialist poem in Myanmar and calling women in burqas letterboxes – just the ones that spring to mind – others have got away with much worse. But then she knew that going in.
“I’d done about six radio interviews back to back that morning and then I made these mistakes.” She knew she’d get dinged for it but not below the bow.
“When the world exploded I was very taken aback,” she says. “I wasn’t someone who no one had heard of before. But the fallout presumed that I was an idiot. I went to grammar school, Newnham College and had done a series of high-status jobs, and no one had ever thought that. So I didn’t think of myself as that. And I didn’t realise that people would slip so easily into thinking of me as that, despite everything they knew about me. Because it’s very hard to eliminate an idea that had no basis in fact in the first place.”
At times it’s as though she floats in and out of a sharpened racial consciousness. One minute she is acutely aware that she will be judged more harshly because she is a Black woman; the next she is surprised when she actually is judged more harshly. Or maybe it is simply the scale and intensity of the attacks that is truly shocking.
Her name became a punchline. “We heard that up in the north of England the Tories were running a campaign all about me, because what could be more horrific than a Black woman as home secretary,” she says. “On national radio I was brought up completely gratuitously by Tory ministers.”
An Amnesty International report in the run-up to the 2017 election revealed that Abbott received almost half of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs. The hate mail arrives with such regularity that learning how to deal with it is part of the training for all new staff in her office. On election day itself, a man pleaded guilty to three charges of sending letters conveying indecent or offensive messages. Abbott’s office had alerted the police three years ago.
But it is one thing being targeted by Tories and racists; it’s quite another to find yourself attacked by your own side. The Labour minister Jess Phillips once claimed she told Abbott to fuck off.
“She didn’t,” Abbott says. “But by going around and telling everyone she did, she thought it gave her a sort of cachet.”
Phillips apologised on Twitter for her behaviour that day but has never said sorry personally. Has Abbott ever taken it up with her? “No.”
Given Phillips was deeply hostile to Corbyn’s leadership, one might put even that down to factionalism. But it’s not as though it has been plain sailing on the left either. Even among those colleagues with whom she is ideologically aligned, Abbott is described as anything from “difficult” to “impossible”. “Stubborn” comes up a lot. She didn’t go to parliament to make friends. And in this she has succeeded. Quite how many of these characteristics are necessary if you are going to persevere as a Black female politician of her generation in a place like the Commons is unknowable but important to think about. As the Kenyan MP Millie Odhiambo told the Kenyan speaker, in a clip that soon went viral, when she was asked to set a good example to the “girls” serving their first term, “Mr Speaker, if they are good girls they will never get corner office. Be a bad girl like Millie Odhiambo and you will be the mother of this house.”
A few days after the LBC interview, Abbott says, Karie Murphy, the executive director of Corbyn’s office, came to her home and told her she should stand down from the shadow cabinet for the rest of the election. Abbott refused. “As far as we were concerned we had left matters unresolved. Then the next morning we heard on the radio we had been stood down. It was a bit of a shock. I think some people around Jeremy convinced themselves that if only I stepped down as shadow home secretary they could win. That was the idea.”
So Abbott found herself embattled within the already embattled project that was Corbyn’s leadership. “It wasn’t great. How can I put it? It was a ‘learning experience’.”
Did she ever take it up with Corbyn? “No … If I took up everything with everybody and looked at all the nastiness that comes in, I’d be paralysed.” Has she just developed a thick skin? “Nobody has skin that thick,” she says, with melancholic emphasis. “Nobody.”
So how has she survived for 37 years with that level of hostility? She says she picks her battles and has a group of female friends that she’s known for years, many of whom have nothing to do with politics.
“But mostly,” she says. “I know what I know.”
What does that mean, I ask. “I know what I believe in and I know my own self-worth. I always have done.”
She recalls a conversation she had with her teacher after she came back from a school trip to Cambridge and said she wanted to apply to the university. “But you’re not up to it,” the teacher said. “But I do think I’m up to it,” the 16-year-old Abbott replied. “And that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
“In a way that’s been my theme,” she says. “Even when the world’s fallen on my head because I got some figures wrong, which is a horrible, horrible experience, I know what I know. In the end I know my own worth.”