Diane Abbott has accused Keir Starmer of treating her as a “non-person” after comments by the Conservative donor Frank Hester who said that looking at the Hackney MP made “you just want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”.
Abbott said in a series of interviews that she expected more support from the party in the aftermath of the comments, which were revealed by the Guardian. She was suspended from the party at the time, and said Starmer did not reach out to her.
Speaking to BBC Two’s Newsnight, she said she had been frightened of being targeted. “One of the reasons it made me frightened is two MPs have been killed in recent years,” she said, referring to the deaths of Jo Cox in 2016 and David Amess in 2021, adding that comments like Hester’s “wind up a certain sort of nutcase and it makes you more vulnerable”.
Abbott said the Labour leader “never reached out to me personally and did treat me as a non-person”. She said: “If somebody was threatening to have you shot, you would have felt your party would have offered you more support, giving you advice on safety and security, even kind of commiserated with you. And none of that happened.”
Speaking on ITV’s Lorraine on Tuesday morning, Abbott said she had support from friends but not her party. “My friends came round, but my friends have always been terribly supportive. Sadly, I didn’t get much support from Keir Starmer … I was a little bit hurt because if you are threatened with death, you expect your party to come round.”
Abbott, who was suspended from the party over a letter she wrote in which she suggested Jewish, Irish and Traveller people were not subject to racism but prejudice, said she agreed she had been wrong but that the incident was used as a device to prevent her standing.
The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP said: “I think that Keir Starmer wanted to finish his clearout of the left in the parliamentary Labour party and by writing a very ill-advised letter I gave him the opportunity to move against me.
“And I think what they were trying to do was to string out and string out the investigation. So when a general election is around the corner, they could just move me out of the way as a Labour candidate because I wouldn’t be in the parliamentary Labour party, and they would parachute in someone else.
“Keir Starmer is always saying: ‘It’s the new Labour party’ … and how could you make it look more new than by getting rid of Diane Abbott?”
She also repeated claims she had made in an earlier interview with the Guardian, saying she was indirectly offered a deal via a “third party” that would have resulted in her standing down before the election – a deal she said she rejected, saying it “was designed to humiliate me”.
Hester issued a statement apologising for his remarks about Abbott, describing them as “rude”, but said his “criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”. The statement said Hester abhorred racism, “not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970s”.
