It’s not every day that you see Keir Starmer’s increasingly ruthless electoral machine in a state of confusion and disarray. But its chaotic approach this week to the question of whether Diane Abbott, a Labour MP for the past 37 years with one of the biggest majorities in the country, could stand in the general election – a question seemingly finally resolved on Friday by Starmer saying that she was “free to go forward as a Labour candidate” – has been very revealing about the condition of the party and of our wider politics.
The whole messy episode could be significant in the election, but also in the longer story of the Labour party and its fractious but pivotal relationships with the left, London and Black Britain. If those relationships with three of Labour’s traditionally strongest bases of support break down – and this week considerable damage has been done – then it may become much harder for it to gain and hold on to power, and for these millions of voters to be properly represented in parliament. Abbott’s ordeal, and her apparent survival of it, matter to many more people than her angry, baffled and now relieved constituents in Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
According to Labour, the fiasco began with the clumsy and offensive letter that she wrote to the Observer in April 2023, claiming that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller people … are not all their lives subject to racism”. She quickly apologised, leading to an eight-month Labour inquiry, a “formal warning” from the party and an instruction to undertake an antisemitism awareness course, which she did in February.
Yet people who follow the sometimes labyrinthine politics of Labour and Hackney North, where I’ve lived since 1994, have long sensed that her parliamentary career might be on borrowed time. “Even before the letter,” Abbott told me last year, “there were rumours going around my constituency that I wasn’t going to be allowed to stand again.” On Tuesday, the political editor of Newsnight, Nicholas Watt, seemed to confirm these suspicions, reporting: “Allies close to the leader of the Labour party … say that Diane Abbott cannot stand because she is in their view a reminder of the Jeremy Corbyn era.”
During Corbyn’s leadership, which Starmer has worked so hard to erase, Abbott was shadow home secretary and one of Corbyn’s closest allies, a role she has had since they rose together through the London left in the 1980s. Hackney North is next door to Corbyn’s constituency, Islington North, where he has been prevented from becoming the Labour candidate and is now standing as an independent.
Although Abbott is 70 and Corbyn 75 – much nearer the end of their careers than the beginning, and long pursued by politically motivated rumours of their imminent retirement – they still have energy, strong local followings and a considerable capacity to make trouble for Labour, whether it is in opposition or government. Having rebelled regularly against New Labour, they are unlikely to be easily silenced by the less formidable party led by Starmer.
For Labour, the Abbott controversy is the first crisis of what had been an almost eerily smooth election campaign. The episode has also been a worrying indication of how a Starmer government might perform under pressure – as a Tory campaign otherwise struggling to find good attack lines has been delighted to point out.
Labour’s initial efforts to calm things by readmitting Abbott to its parliamentary party, and insisting that her fate would be decided by the party’s national executive committee (NEC) “in due course”, did not work at all. Abbott received support from a startlingly wide range of sources, from Starmer’s more left-leaning deputy, Angela Rayner, to the Daily Mail.
Starmer is a methodical person, practised at gradually getting his way in organisations through the use of rules and procedures – but politics does not always happen in neat stages. Moreover, his supposedly neutral language about following “a process” with Abbott and wanting “the highest possible quality candidates” failed to conceal – in fact, made look even worse – a crude pre-election purge of the left. Abbott seemed to be becoming one of its victims, joining Corbyn, and two much younger would-be candidates, Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle.
Having already alienated Muslim voters over Gaza, and climate-conscious voters by scaling back its green policies, Labour now risks doing the same with leftwing voters and Black voters, who usually overwhelmingly support the party. Labour’s more gung-ho electoral strategists like to boast that the party doesn’t need these groups any more, so strong is its appeal to “hero voters” switching to Labour from the Tories. At this election, these strategists could turn out to be right: the Tories’ unpopularity may mean Labour does not need a huge vote to win handsomely. But the party’s survival in office long enough to undertake “the decade of renewal” that Starmer is promising feels unlikely without broad support.
For Abbott, being left in limbo for more than a year by a party she has been involved in for half a century has been intensely distressing. She is a contradictory politician: both a stubborn, thick-skinned veteran of countless battles with the Labour hierarchy, starting with her involvement in the campaign to establish Black sections in the party back in the mid-1980s, and yet also vulnerable to feelings of isolation and futility. For her decades representing turbulent, socially divided Hackney to be terminated, not by her or by voters – her majority is 33,188 – but by supposed colleagues who publicly praised her as a “trailblazer” while they privately mobilised the party bureaucracy against her, was a very painful prospect.
Politics is a rough game. You may think that how Labour treats Abbott, or Corbyn, only really matters to a few thousand lefties in north and east London. But that is to underestimate the pair’s continuing importance as practical campaigners and political symbols to people across Britain – and as obstacles to the erosion of this country’s political pluralism. In this election, the two main parties are competing to be the most patriotic, the most “fiscally responsible”, the most focused on “security”. If you think politics could and should be about more than those things, then, until a new generation of high-profile leftwing MPs emerges, imperfect and incautious politicians such as Abbott may be the best hope you’ve got.
For now, perhaps she can briefly savour a belated victory – assuming the NEC follows Starmer’s lead. As when Margaret Thatcher’s government undertook the protracted abolition of the radical Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s, while Abbott was working there, an undemocratic attempt to silence the left has achieved the opposite. She may be enjoying the irony.
Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist. His book on Diane Abbott, Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour left since the 1960s, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies, is out now
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