Had her former boyfriend Jeremy Corbyn won an unlikely victory in 2019, Diane Abbott would have become the country’s first black home secretary. Instead, she now appears destined to bow out of politics altogether – following a botched attempt to ease her out of Parliament with a modicum of dignity.
Ms Abbott, 70, was suspended by Labour in April 2023 following comments she made in a newspaper article about Jewish people experiencing a lower level of racism than black people.
Incredibly, Sir Keir Starmer had insisted the investigation into her behaviour was ongoing despite 13 months having passed, but with the election five weeks away Ms Abbott needed a decision on whether she could stand as a Labour candidate.
Sir Keir Starmer’s team wanted to give her a “soft landing” so that she could “go with grace”, party sources said. They decided to restore the Labour whip with the expectation that she would then announce her retirement.
But someone in the Labour Party had other ideas, briefing the media on Tuesday that she would be barred from standing as a Labour candidate in July. Ms Abbott said on Wednesday morning she was “dismayed” to be barred, prompting a backlash from supporters including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who said the trailblazing MP should be “given the respect she deserves”.
A day that was earmarked by Sir Keir’s team for hammering the Conservatives’ record on the NHS, instead descended into a day of chaos – as Labour seemed incapable of deciding whether the truth lay.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said he was “not particularly” comfortable with the way Ms Abbott had been treated, with Sir Keir later saying “no decision has been taken barring her” – but whether that meant she would be endorsed as a candidate remained unclear.
Jess Phillips, the former Labour leadership candidate, said Ms Abbott should be able to stand, though she added to the confusion by saying: “Just because you’ve got the Labour whip doesn’t mean that the Labour Party think you’re a good MP.”
Martin Forde KC, who wrote a report into racism in the Labour Party, said the lack of transparency over the decision about Ms Abbott was “deeply disturbing”. The Tories said Sir Keir’s refusal to ban her showed he was weak, while Jess Barnard, who sits on Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee, said the whole thing had been a “total farce”. And still, her future remained unclear.
It was perhaps inevitable that what appears to be the end of a career that has spanned five decades came not with thanks but with recriminations.
Along with Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell, Ms Abbott was one of the few remaining MPs from a far-Left wing of the Labour Party that was aligned with “Red” Ken Livingstone and the late Tottenham MP Bernie Grant in the 1980s.
A regular guest on the BBC’s Question Time and This Week, she is one of Labour’s most recognisable faces, but also one of its most controversial, and never held a ministerial post in 37 years as the MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington.
Born in Paddington, Ms Abbott, whose parents were Jamaican, attended a girls’ grammar school in Harrow, where she appeared in school plays put on with the local boys’ school, including a production of Macbeth in which she played Lady Macduff opposite a young Michael Portillo as Macduff.
She went on to read history at Cambridge, then worked briefly at the Home Office before jobs as a race relations officer for Liberty and as a researcher for Thames Television and, later, its breakfast show TV-am.
It was in the late 1970s that she met and had a relationship with Mr Corbyn, who was then a councillor in north London.
In 1984, in the middle of a four-year stint as a councillor on Westminster City Council, Ms Abbott gave an interview to a pro-Republican magazine in which she expressed support for the IRA and said that “every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us”.
The following year she began working as a press officer for Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council until it was abolished by Margaret Thatcher, and in 1987 she was elected to Parliament at the first attempt, becoming Britain’s first black female MP.
Decades of service on parliamentary select committees followed, including the Treasury, home affairs and foreign affairs committees, but when New Labour swept to power she was overlooked for ministerial roles following more controversy. She had complained that her local hospital should not be employing nurses from Finland because they had never met a black person before, while her fellow MP and ally Bernie Grant suggested Scandinavians probably had no idea how to take the temperature of a black person.
Ms Abbott was also opposed to some of New Labour’s most important policies, including the renewal of the Trident nuclear weapons system and the decision to go to war in Iraq.
She was accused of rank hypocrisy in 2003 when she decided to send her son James - her only child from a two-year marriage - to the private City of London School, having accused colleagues of making “indefensible” decisions to send their children to selective schools.
Confined to the backbenches, she renewed her double act with Mr Portillo, appearing with him as a pundit on the BBC’s short-lived politics show This Week. The BBC Trust later decided it should not have paid her to appear on the show as she was there as a Labour representative.
Nevertheless, she stood for the Labour leadership in 2010 and secured the backing of 33 MPs, before losing to Ed Miliband – who made her shadow public health minister.
Five years later she was one of those who backed Mr Corbyn’s leadership bid and when he unexpectedly won, he made her shadow international development secretary, shadow health secretary and then shadow home secretary.
Her performance during the 2017 general election campaign was marred by a series of interviews, in which she struggled with figures. During an appearance on LBC, she gave inaccurate information about how Labour’s plan to recruit 10,000 extra police officers would be funded and could be heard shuffling papers. Ms Abbott later revealed that she had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two years previously and that her blood sugar levels had been “out of control” when she was doing the interviews.
In 2019, she achieved another landmark when she stood in for Mr Corbyn at Prime Minister’s Questions, becoming the first black MP to appear at the despatch box during the weekly event.
She then stood down from her front bench role when Sir Keir Starmer became Labour leader in 2020 and in 2023 came the controversy that was to overshadow the final year of her career.
Writing to The Observer, she claimed that Jewish people, Irish people and Travellers do not experience racism “all their lives” in the way that black people do.
She quickly apologised but Sir Keir, who had promised to purge his party of anti-Semitism, suspended the Labour whip. Ms Abbott was finally restored on Tuesday, which triggered more confusion, as even senior ministers were left in the dark about her future.
