Optimistic against the odds

Mike Phipps reviews  A Woman Like Me, by Diane Abbott, published by Penguin Viking.

During this year’s general election campaign, Diane Abbott dominated the headlines, much to the irritation of Labour’s leadership. The refusal of Labour officials to guarantee that she would be allowed to run again as the Labour candidate in her Hackney North seat led to a massive campaign in the Party and beyond, which not only forced Keir Starmer to allow her to run but also stalled further attempts by the leadership to remove other left wingers on spurious grounds.

The uncertainty over her candidacy had festered despite the fact that a Party investigation into a badly-worded letter she had written to a newspaper, for which she quickly apologised at the time, had concluded months earlier. As pressure mounted, it became clear to many that the incident was being manipulated in a factional attempt to oust Abbott from her seat.

This book was finished before the final outcome of that drama, but it covers many of the other controversies which the author found herself at the centre of. The early chapters cover much of the ground – family, school, university – that is detailed in the 2020 Authorised Biography by Robin Bunce and Samara Linton, published by Biteback, reviewed on Labour Hub at the time.

As noted then, ”From early on, Abbott felt like an outsider. One of only three black pupils in a suburban primary school, and academically outstanding, still she was never invited to her best friend’s house, not even for a birthday party, despite their being inseparable at school. At grammar school, one teacher refused to mark her work, on the grounds that her essay was so good it must have been copied from elsewhere.”

The difference in Abbott’s own book is both a greater amount of human detail and her doggedly optimistic tone, notwithstanding the racism and social isolation she frequently encountered and the personal pain of her parents’ acrimonious break-up.

A short stint in the civil service as an administrative trainee at the Home Office gave her a penetrating insight into the ruthlessness senior civil servants would resort to in order to thwart the policies of elected ministers. Her growing involvement in Labour Party politics introduced her to many figures who would play a significant role on the Labour left over the next 40 years.

It is, however, the careerists who crossed her path about whom she is particularly caustic, as with Patricia Hewitt – later a privatising Blairite minister – who was head of the National Council for Civil Liberties when Diane Abbott worked there. Hewitt’s eagerness to get a parliamentary seat was such that “the joke among colleagues was that some elderly Labour MP only had to look a bit poorly and Patricia would be on the train to his constituency the next day.”

Despite being physically barred from entering her first Labour Party branch meeting when she moved to Paddington, Abbott soon established herself and got elected to Westminster Council, the first Black person to do so. Her recognition of how under-represented and marginalized Black people were in the Party led her to help set up the campaign for Black sections.

Her own attempt to get selected as an parliamentary candidate, however, met with frustration: “I was tired of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and tired of being humiliated.” Eventually, she won selection for the safe seat of Hackney North and was elected in 1987, the only Black woman to get in, the attempts by Sharon Atkin and Martha Osamor having been blocked by Labour’s apparatus.

Despite the leadership’s hostility, she served on the Commons backbench Treasury and Civil Service Select Committee. When the Party won office at the 1997 general election, Labour’s whips removed her from the Committee, as she was viewed by Chancellor Gordon Brown as too independent-minded. Had New Labour had any real commitment to governmental accountability, they would have promoted her to Chair.

This is a much more personal memoir than the 2020 biography, with greater emphasis on personal and family relationships. She describes being in labour, about to give birth to her son James, when she was lobbied by her midwife about a hospital pay dispute! Her efforts to manage a newborn baby alongside her parliamentary duties underline how unadapted for younger women members Parliament was – and arguably still is.

The New Labour years saw Diane, like most left MPs, stuck on the backbenches. One highlight for her was her 2008 speech against proposed legislation introducing 42 days’ detention without trial for terrorist suspects, which won her The Spectator’s Parliamentarian Speech of the Year and a Liberty Human Rights Award.

When Gordon Brown stood down after losing the 2010 general election, Abbott ran for the Party leadership, losing, but being ‘rewarded’ by Ed Miliband with a junior ministerial post in charge of public health, from which she would later be sacked as he moved rightwards.

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership after 2015, she joined the Shadow Cabinet for the first time. Given Diane’s place at the heart of the critical events of the time, this is one of the more disappointing parts of the book, with few new insights into these turbulent years.

Diane’s treatment of the years since 2019 is equally cursory. But she is withering about both Keir Starmer’s support for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the shabby way his leadership team treated her: “The assault on Gaza has clarified the issues related to charges of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. We have seen repeatedly that allies of the current leadership are treated very differently when it comes to allegations of anti-Semitism, as compared to the left of the party and critics of the current leadership… one of the cases most invoked to prove its factionalism is the way I have been treated.”

For Diane this attitude was not new. Since her election in 1987, the Party treated its first Black MP as an embarrassment, despite the vilification she received in the media – not to mention the huge volume of hate mail. Worse, in the Corbyn years, leading Party apparatchiks joined in, one calling her “truly repulsive” in subsequently-leaked WhatsApp messages. When Tory donor Frank Hester was reported this year to have said “Diane Abbott needs to be shot”, it was 24 hours before anyone from the Party bothered to get in touch.

Diane Abbott’s resilience shines through this book. Despite the years of defeat, she retains her optimism and commitment to resolving the issues she came into politics to address and still cares passionately about.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.