Last month, Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP Diane Abbott announced she would be returning to the backbenches under the new Labour leadership. The move marks the end of an often difficult three and a half years as Shadow Home Secretary.
Abbott, 66, made history when she became the first black female MP to enter the Commons, in 1987. On a terrible night for her party, even in London, Abbott stood at the podium in the Town Hall on Mare Street, a bunch of Labour roses in hand, and proclaimed her win “a victory for faith, a victory for principle, and a victory for socialism.” It was a massively inspiring moment for black women across the country.
Since that day she’s been a stalwart of the Socialist Campaign Group (a caucus of left-wing Labour MPs), rebelling 177 times against the “New Labour” government of 1997-2010 – compared with only 13 times since then. Needless to say, she wasn’t offered any ministerial positions under Tony Blair or Gordon Brown.
When her longtime friend (and one-time lover) Jeremy Corbyn faced a coup against his leadership in the aftermath of the 2016 EU referendum, Abbott was thrust into his new shadow cabinet.
During the 2017 general election she received the most attention of her career. Her inability to say how much money would be required to recruit 10,000 new police officers under a Labour government quickly went viral and was branded a “car crash”. The interview was followed by further on-air disasters, including an apparent failure to read a much-discussed counter-terrorism report in the wake of that summer’s London Bridge attack.
While much of the criticism was earned, in that she didn’t appear to be on top of her brief, the Conservatives took a curious and particular relish in warning the electorate against elevating Abbott to one of the great offices of state. Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary at the time, mentioned her name three times in a single interview. As someone who has long recognised the power of racist stereotypes, Johnson was tapping into a groundswell of cruelty towards Abbott. During that year’s election, Abbott received half of all online abuse directed against MPs.
The notion that she was bad at maths had enormous sticking power. On an edition of Question Time last year, the programme’s host, Fiona Bruce, appeared to play to the gallery by asserting that Abbott was wrong in saying Labour were “kind of level-pegging” with the Conservatives in the polls, which was in fact true. “No, you’re behind, Diane,” she said with exasperation. “Definitely behind”, drawing roars of laughter.
All of the abuse she went through, a great deal of it racialised, made her response to the numerous cases of anti-Semitism among Labour members disappointing. A low point was her retweeting a Liverpool Echo article, in which former Labour MP Luciana Berger is quoted as saying she wouldn’t be joining the Liberal Democrats – on the day that she did. The fact that Berger was left politically homeless after being bullied out of her local Labour party by anti-Semites, with no support from Corbyn, did not seem to register with Abbott.
Her chosen candidate for Labour’s new deputy leader is Richard Burgon, who has called Zionism (the belief in the Jewish people’s right to have a nation) “the enemy of peace”. Likewise, her chosen candidate for leader is Rebecca Long-Bailey, who gave the least convincing performance among the three contenders on the question of anti-Semitism at the hustings held by the Jewish Labour Movement. Doubtless, she is supporting these candidates because she regards them as being closest to Corbyn, but her unwavering loyalty to the leader and his project has proven to be her greatest weakness as a parliamentarian in recent years.
Where once she showed such a strong and independent voice, for example, on abortion rights for women in Northern Ireland, Abbott seemed entirely unable to call out the processes and people that were allowing anti-Jewish racism to grow within her party. Indeed, she was unrelentingly positive about Corbyn and Labour’s general secretary, Jennie Formby, who came under fire in the BBC’s Panorama documentary about anti-Semitism in Labour.
The one moment in the last year in which she appeared to have truly won the nation’s heart was in an increasingly rare act of rebellion from her, when she was caught sipping from an M&S can of mojito on the Overground. While some criticised her for drinking on public transport, many more found this rulebook-clutching (it broke a law introduced by Johnson when he was mayor) to be ridiculous. Let’s hope Abbott can recapture that spirit of defiance. Whether it be defending her constituents from the hostile environment or campaigning against cuts to public services, her return to backbenches could offer real opportunity for her.
