When Diane Abbott moved house in 1980 and tried to switch her Labour membership from the Hampstead constituency to the Paddington branch, she was at first rebuffed. “I later learned that local Labour members had been told that a scarily radical Black woman had moved into the area and might try to join the party – and they were determined to keep me out,” she writes in her new memoir, A Woman Like Me.
It’s an astonishing revelation from a woman who would go on to break so many political barriers.
Born in 1953, Abbott was the daughter of working-class Jamaican immigrants (her father was a factory worker, her mother an NHS nurse) who came to Britain in the 1950s. Her life has been one trailblazing moment after another: from being the third black girl ever to win a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, to being honoured as Mother of the House of Commons (the longest continuously serving female MP) in July, 37 years after she became the first black woman to enter parliament.
Other achievements, she notes in her new memoir, include being “the first Black woman to stand for the leadership of a major political party in the UK; the first Black woman to shadow one of the four great offices of state; the first Black woman to take PMQs”.
Someone unfamiliar with Abbott’s career might expect her to be held up within Labour as a progressive pioneer. No one with half an eye on British politics would make that mistake. That juxtaposition – Abbott’s phenomenal achievements and the distrust and hostility between her and her party – runs through the heart of this book. It’s a memoir, but also a record of a war that has divided Labour for half a century.
Over 300 pages Abbott charts her journey, from growing up first in the vibrant Caribbean community in Paddington and then the cool suburbia of leafy Harrow, through a history degree at Cambridge, stints as a civil servant in the Home Office, a civil liberties campaigner and TV journalist, and into front-line politics. It’s a story marked at every stage by racial prejudice that Abbott has no qualms about confronting.
She recounts bluntly a Teddy-boy mob going door-to-door on a “n****r-hunt” around her area of Paddington, turning away from her home only when the family’s white Irish tenant opened the door. When her father wants to move them to Harrow (where the schools are better and there weren’t marauding groups of racists as in Paddington and Notting Hill), estate agents refuse to show him homes. The man who eventually does sell them a house there, Abbott writes, “hated Jewish people and, as he had a number of Jewish neighbours, he sold to Daddy to spite them”.
At the smart all-girls grammar school where she is the only black pupil (her left-wing parents, Abbott notes, “had no idea that good socialists were not supposed to send their children to selective schools”), she is repeatedly underestimated by teachers, accused of copying an essay deemed far too good for her to have written herself and discouraged from applying to Oxbridge. Defying expectations to win a place at Newnham, she attends a May Ball dressed up in black tie only for one of the organisers to assume she is there to help clean up: “He did not ask himself why anyone would wear an evening dress and diamante to do the washing up. He saw only that I was a Black woman and therefore must belong in the kitchen.”
These anecdotes are shocking for their ubiquity and the matter-of-fact way in which Abbott recalls them, as both utterly unacceptable and inevitable for a young woman of Jamaican heritage growing up in a country grappling with its burgeoning immigrant communities. Though she never explicitly examines how they shape her politics, by the time she tentatively approaches the Labour Party she has a deep – and justified – sense that something has gone very badly wrong.
The rest, for Westminster watchers, is history. Abbott is sucked into the orbit of the radical left-wing firebrand Ken Livingstone. She becomes a disciple of Tony Benn, and definitive figure in her own right on London’s Labour left scene as it sought to challenge Margaret Thatcher’s dominance. She forms close bonds with John McDonnell and, of course, a young Jeremy Corbyn with whom she is instantly infatuated, describing how he “drew me in and infected me with his love and enthusiasm for the party”. Their budding romance does not last. Abbott recalls an austere Christmas at the Corbyn family home where there is no alcohol, nor any real sense of celebration. “Jeremy was 99 per cent absorbed in party politics,” she recounts with some frustration four decades later; their relationship falters when she suggests they go out on a date and he takes her to Highgate Cemetery to view the grave of Karl Marx. His influence on her, though, endures for the rest of her political career.
This is where the book becomes less of a memoir and more of an apologia. The story of Abbott’s recent years is inextricably intertwined with the rise and fall Corbyn as Labour leader. Abbott served on Corbyn’s front bench, first as shadow health secretary and then shadow home secretary. She was one of his biggest cheerleaders: through his leadership bid in 2015, the Brexit referendum, the 2017 and 2019 elections, and the anti-Semitism scandal that rocked Labour under his leadership and resulted eventually in his expulsion from the Parliamentary Labour Party when he refused to accept the findings of a report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission on the crisis in 2020.
Abbott had her own personal anti-Semitism scandal in April 2023, when she wrote in a letter to the Observer that while Irish, Jewish and traveller people “undoubtedly experience prejudice” that is “similar to racism”, “they are not all their lives subject to racism”, comparing anti-Jewish and anti-traveller prejudice to that experienced by people with red hair. She had the Labour whip suspended for more than a year. Indeed, it was only restored just before the 2024 election after a row about whether or not Abbott would be allowed to stand for the seat she had held since 1987. There were rumours that the Labour leadership hoped she would have the whip restored but stand down on her own terms. If that was the plan, something somewhere went awry; Abbott was elected as a Labour MP for the tenth time in July.
That election is beyond the scope of this book. The most recent incident Abbott mentions is the furore in March 2024 over Frank Hester, the Conservative donor who wrote despicably racist things about her. She voices her fury at not being called upon to speak in a session of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) – she still had the Labour whip suspended – in which MPs expressed their outrage over her treatment. Her memoir, first announced in spring 2021, was clearly not intended for publication two months after an election, especially not one resulting in a Labour landslide.
If the first chapter of her life was about fighting prejudice in a world that continually underestimated her, the rest for Abbott is about fighting a more specific enemy: the Labour Party. From the day she is almost turned away from a local association meeting in Paddington in 1980, to that PMQs session in 2024, Abbott lines up blow after blow at the “establishment” of her party.
Grievances can be found on almost every page. She was not supposed to win selection as the Labour candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987, where the incumbent Labour MP, Ernie Roberts, was intending to run again. She recalls a Labour official telling her, “We did not think you could win. Otherwise we would have done something.” She recounts an “extremely hostile climate at the top of Labour Party”, which seems embarrassed to have a black female candidate and offers her no support – in her campaign, or in subsequent appearances on shows such as Question Time, on which she becomes a regular guest. The chief Labour whip won’t give her an office. Neil Kinnock’s team “blew a gasket” when she joins the Treasury Select Committee. Tony Blair deeply disappoints her by moving Labour to the centre, even with three election victories, and by going to war in Iraq. Gordon Brown tries to patronise her into voting for a bill extending the time that terror suspects could be detained without charge: “Why he imagined telling me I was stupid was a compelling argument, I’ll never know.” She is equally scathing about Ed Miliband, then finally Keir Starmer.
Throughout it all, Abbott talks about “hostility” and outright “conspiracy” against her and her allies in the left-wing Socialist Campaign Group of the Labour Party. Often, she puts this down to racism and misogyny; when she is not selected to be Labour’s candidate for London mayor in 2012, for example, she suggests white male leftists “did not want to see a Black woman in a position of power”. But there are clearly other forces at play, because the white, male Corbyn faces similar headwinds when he unexpectedly becomes leader in 2015. “The unremitting hostility shown to Jeremy by the Labour right and their media supporters was rooted in fury at being made to look fools by him and by Labour Party members,” Abbott argues. Later, “his enemies never let facts get in the way of an attack”.
It will not come as a surprise that Abbott views Corbyn’s leadership as a brief window of hope and triumph in Labour’s history – it is the centrepiece of her memoir. The Brexit referendum is skirted over in a few short paragraphs. Of the 2017 election in which the Tories won the most seats but lost their majority, Abbott recalls “it felt like we had won”. Of Labour’s 2019 disaster, she writes the bare minimum, ascribing the historic defeat to the fact that “politically, the error of too many colleagues (except Jeremy) was to put the issue of Brexit ahead of getting him into Number 10”.
In Abbott’s telling, it is not the electorate’s wholesale rejection of Corbyn and his project that largely forces him to resign as Labour leader, but the anti-Semitism scandal that breaks under his leadership – the result of a “conspiracy against him by his enemies in the party”. She acknowledges concerns about the party’s ability to deal with complaints of anti-Semitism, but blames the media – specifically, in quoting an article from the Morning Star, the Jewish Chronicle, Jewish News and the Jewish Telegraph – for fuelling fears and doing “immense damage” to the Labour Party’s reputation.
As for Abbott’s own brushes with the divisive issue of anti-Semitism in Labour, she points to the large Jewish community in her seat (“If I really did hate Jewish people, I think that after more than thirty years my neighbours and constituents would certainly have worked that out”). The Observer letter that saw her suspended from the parliamentary party is described as “ill-judged” and “clumsy”: Abbott notes she swiftly apologised for it, though she stands by the sentiment. “The vitriol of the response in the press and the public debate surprised me, although perhaps I should have known by that point not to be surprised by any attacks against me in the media.”
A Woman Like Me paints a fascinating picture of British politics and its uneasy interaction with matters of race and gender. She goes through a division lobby with her two-week-old son strapped to her chest because there are no childcare options available; parliamentary staff try to charge her for the cleaning of a room in which she has held a reception with black guests. Having worked in the civil service, she has arch words to say about the propensity of officials to block measures from elected ministers with which they disagree, and is clear-eyed on the British state’s failures on the most vulnerable communities, particularly immigrants, ethnic minorities and women.
But the subject on which the book is most revealing is Abbott herself. There is a defensiveness to her writing: she is quick to spot hostility against her and her closest allies, and single-minded in her assessment of its motives. Points of political difference are glossed over; there is little attempt to bring readers onboard with the left-wing causes she has spent her life championing, from gay rights to Palestine to a united Ireland. There is even less analysis of the wider failings of the Corbyn project. Perhaps the assumption is that her readers will already agree with her.
Intentionally or not, she has a tendency to elide the horrendous racist and sexist abuse she has suffered (in the run-up to the 2017 election she was targeted with almost as much abuse as all other female MPs put together) with justifiable criticisms of her conduct and positions over the years. On her move to send her son to a private school despite her egalitarian principles, she does not acknowledge the perceived hypocrisy but blames first the UK school system for failing black children and then the media, while putting the responsibility for her decision on to her son. In fact, the only mistake she regrets in the book is angering Ken Livingstone by running against him for Labour selection in Brent East in 1985 – something she puts down to taking “very poor advice from people in the constituency who disliked me personally”.
In his recent book The Searchers, which documents the lives of Abbott alongside her fellow Socialist Campaign Group rebels, Andy Beckett describes her as having “a self-sufficiency so fierce that it could isolate her completely”. That self-sufficiency powered her remarkable rise. Abbott’s resilience is an inspiration to women, immigrants and people of colour, whatever their politics. She is the daughter of immigrants systematically pushed aside; a single mother balancing parenthood with politics in a world where MPs were still assigned a hook on which to hang their swords; an uncompromising champion of causes from civil liberties for refugees to the victims of the Windrush scandal.
But there is also a brittleness to the way she reflects on her exceptional career: walls always up, forever on the lookout for enemies, fuelled by defiance and self-justification that – perhaps – keeps her on an unnecessary warpath with her party. Black women in public life, Abbott writes at the end of A Woman Like Me, “are never allowed to make mistakes, certainly not publicly”. Maybe that is why she does not feel able to admit any.
A Woman Like Me: A Memoir
Diane Abbott
Viking, 336pp, £25
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?