“I have come a long way to stand before you tonight,” said newly elected Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington Diane Abbott in 1987 during her victory speech, wearing a beaming smile, but with tears in her eyes. At only 33 years old, Abbott had achieved a remarkable feat, as the first black woman to become a Member of Parliament in the UK. “I am aware that a lot of hopes, not just in Hackney, but across the country, ride on our victory tonight,” she went on. "I hope and believe that I can fulfil those hopes.”
Abbott, now 70, has even further since that speech, almost 40 years ago, and this week yet again finds herself at the centre of a row in the Labour party at a critical moment in its history. Abbott claims that she has been barred from standing as a Labour candidate in the July 4 general election. However, Labour leader Sir Keir has insisted no decision had yet been taken about whether Abbott will be allowed to defend her seat.
Abbott had the Labour whip suspended in April 2023 after she suggested Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experience prejudice, but not racism, in a letter to a newspaper. After apologising and taking a training course, she had the Labour whip restored over a year later, on Tuesday, 28 May 2024. However, she claims she has been barred from standing in her Hackney North and Stoke Newington seat, which would make her one of several left-wing candidates who had been blocked by Starmer’s Labour.
Despite being so connected in the public imagination with Hackney, Abbott was actually born in Paddington. She came from a humble background, explaining her origins in a 2016 speech. “My mother came to this country from Jamaica as a pupil nurse,” she said. “She worked in the NHS until she retired. My mother had left school at fourteen, because that was what working class girls did in rural Jamaica in the nineteen forties.” Abbott’s father was a welder.
Abbott attended Harrow County School for Girls – a grammar school – and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read history. She was an administration trainee at the Home Office, a Race Relations Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties and worked in television, before becoming a press officer at the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, all the time involved in local politics.
Speaking of her mother’s reaction to her election in 1987, Abbott once said: “Her great-great-grandparents would have been slaves, and to see her daughter standing up there in Parliament would have been extraordinary for her.” Abbott had political ambitions from a young age. “If I were prime minister, I would do this. If I were secretary general of the UN, I would do the other," she recalls thinking.
In her early years in politics, Abbott was active in the Labour Party Black Sections movement, alongside Bernie Grant, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz, campaigning for more Black and Asian representation in politics. She was on the Treasury Select Committee and Foreign Affairs Select Committee, but never held ministerial office during the Blair years.
Abbott is a fine orator. In 2008, her speech condemning the Labour Government’s motion to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days (which she argued would “make us less safe, not more safe”) was praised by Tory David Davies as “one of the finest speeches I have heard since being elected to the House of Commons”. Prime Minister Gordon Brown eventually had to drop the law.
When Labour fell out of power in 2010, Abbott stood for the leadership, but lost to Ed Miliband. She was then made Shadow Minister for Public Health until 2013. She stood to be Labour’s candidate for London mayor in 2015, but lost to Sadiq Khan. When Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, she was Shadow Secretary of State for International Development, Shadow Health Secretary, and then Shadow Home Secretary, a prominent role.
In 2017, before that year’s general election, an interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari about Labour's pledge to recruit an extra 10,000 police officers caught the public imagination when Abbott struggled to explain how the promise would be funded. She later told the Guardian that she had been diagnosed with diabetes, which affected her performance. “During the election campaign, everything went crazy – and the diabetes was out of control, the blood sugar was out of control,” she said, blaming low blood sugar during a series of interviews.
Abbott remained Shadow Home Secretary into 2019. That year, she apologised after a photo was taken of her sipping a can of M&S mojito on a London Overground train. “A photo of me drinking from a can of M&S mojito on the Overground has been circulated,” she said online. "I'm sincerely sorry for drinking on TfL."
Away from frontline politics, Abbott was something of a pioneer on TV. With Michael Portillo and Andrew Neil on the BBC’s This Week, she helped create a much-loved television show about the political climate of the day. Abbott and Portillo knew each other since their schooldays, during which they appeared in joint school productions of Romeo and Juliet, and had a largely friendly rapport on screen, even when they disagreed. Over the years, she has also appeared on Have I Got News for You, Celebrity Come Dine with Me, and Cash in the Celebrity Attic.
Many have highlighted Abbott’s key role in left-wing politics over the past four decades. The Searchers, a recent biography by journalist Andy Beckett of Abbott and her fellow left-wing veterans Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, portrays her as fiercely self-sufficient but subject to “the double-edged prestige of being a pioneer” – as well as being stubborn to a fault, according to LabourList. Beckett argues that Abbott and the rest are underrated as electoral politicians, able to marshal broad coalitions within their constituencies and consistently increase their majorities.
Abbott has been supported in her recent travails by Corbyn, who she has known for a long time. They were romantically involved in the 1970s, when he was a councillor in north London. The pair famously went on a motorbike tour of East Germany together, camping along the way.
In 1991, she married David P. Ayensu-Thompson, a Ghanaian architect, and they had one son, James.
Abbott was again at the centre of controversy in 2003, when she decided to send James to the private City of London School, after criticising colleagues for sending their children to selective schools. “I knew what could happen to my son if he was sent to the wrong school and got in with the wrong crowd,” she said at the time. James later suffered from mental health issues, and was in 2020 charged with a string of violent offences including allegedly assaulting police and NHS staff.
Abbott has often found herself in the middle of race rows. In 1996, she was criticised after she said that "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" were unsuitable as nurses at her local hospital because they had "never met a black person before”. In 2012, Abbott tweeted: "White people love playing 'divide and rule'. We should not play their game." She later apologised for "any offence caused”.
Throughout her time in politics, Abbott has received cruel racist abuse. In 2017, Amnesty International found that she had received almost half of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the run-up to the general election, ten times as much as was received by any other female MP. Earlier this year, it was reported that Tory donor Frank Hester had said Abbott made him want "to hate all black women" and that she "should be shot". In response, Abbott said she had been "upset" by the comments but was "hardened to racist abuse".
Alongside her eventful career in public life, Abbott has quietly and steadily built her majority in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. It now sits at over 33,000, making it one of the safest seats in the country. Despite that, it remains uncertain if Abbott will be allowed to fight the seat for Labour again. In her happy but tearful 1987 speech all that time ago, Abbott finished by saying "this campaign and this result has been a victory for faith, a victory for principle and a victory for socialism". Will she be able to make another victory speech this summer?
