Did Diane Abbott deserve to be humiliated?

For reasons which I have never convincingly managed to explain to myself, I have, ever since I can remember, been affronted by injustice. It’s an entirely unpredictable feeling. It is not political or ideological. Nor is it necessary rational. But it comes from deep inside and is entirely authentic. Sometimes on closer examination it proves misguided. But the Labour Party’s treatment of Diane Abbot has undeniably sparked my injustice hormone.

After a long suspension, it was reported by The Times that she would be readmitted to the Labour Party, but barred from standing again for her seat, Hackney and Stoke Newington, which she has represented since 1987. Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, now denies this, saying that there is “no reason” why she should not stand again.

We shall come to the rational part of the arguments around this sorry tale. But, on an intuitive level, it just feels wrong, disrespectful, not just of the first black woman to enter Parliament in 1987, but also of her constituents in Hackney and Stoke Newington, whom she has served faithfully for nearly four decades.

Keir Starmer is on the brink of power partly because the last 14 years of Tory government have been, to put it mildly, sub-optimal. But if and when he gets into Downing Street, it will be largely because he has rooted out every last vestige of Corbynism: a version of social democracy that had drifted too close to the revolutionary or protest-led socialism found in countries like Greece, Italy and France. Britons don’t like extremism (Rishi Sunak please note).

Inevitably that means sweeping out Jeremy Corbyn’s followers. A purge is political violence with a purpose, whether you’re Boris Johnson kicking illustrious Tory Remainers out of his party or Keir Starmer preparing to woo middle Britain.

But how far do you go? How monochrome do you want your party to be? What separates healthy nonconformism from repression?

Quite a few Labour MPs — including some members of the Shadow Cabinet such as Wes Streeting, Shadow Health Secretary — are plainly uncomfortable with the way Abbot has been treated by the party’s central command. And of course the media, including the Tory press, are making hay.

To be sure, Abbot is not a vanilla MP. The middle Britain that Starmer wishes to entice, that is guided in its judgements by the Daily Mail, will not mourn her. In the grand scheme of things excluding her is a relatively risk-free move.

Abbot is a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad. She has proved divisive, stroppy and occasionally loopy. In 1996, Abbott said that “blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls” were unsuitable as nurses at her local hospital because they had “never met a black person before”.

Her foreign policy instincts are, by and large, in tune with Corbyn’s anti-Westernism. So not mad about NATO and unhelpfully ambivalent about Ukraine. She is a harsh critic of Israel. Yet she voted in favour of military intervention in Libya. So not entirely consistent either.

There is a curious haughtiness about Abbott. Perhaps that’s down to her Cambridge education. She provokes strong feelings. The Tories’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, told a 2019 gathering that Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” adding that the MP “should be shot”. Abbott receives more hate mail than any female MP.

She can be desperately awkward in public. The words that come out of her mouth are not always finely synchronised with what her brain wants to say. During the 2015 general election she bungled a series of interviews, freezing when put on the spot. She had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, she said and because of a poor diet “everything went crazy”.

The MP crossed Starmer’s red line when she wrote a balefully stupid letter to the Observer in which she, in effect, said that Jewish people did not experience racial prejudice. The idea that the racist abuse Abbott receives as a black person is “worse” than the anti-Semitism suffered by Jews is, of course, nonsense. Abuse is blind to ethnicity and colour. She has been suspended from the party ever since.

Abbott apologised and went on a course about anti-Semitism. But with hindsight that letter sealed her fate. The commissars in Starmer’s inner circle had marked her card and, it seems, there is no going back.

The distressing part of the story is that Abbott has gone from being a trailblazing MP for black people to a pawn in Starmer’s chess game to sanitise the Labour Party. Yet she has fought all her political life for minorities and against racism; she is instinctively a supporter of the underdog.

Abbott is, in her own blundering way, a significant political figure. She has a claim to speak for a big part of Britain’s less privileged population, a voice that is conspicuously absent among the current Labour front bench.

The way she has been treated will sow a doubt in the minds of aspiring young black people about Starmer’s commitment to dealing with racism.

Abbott is not alone in being targeted by Labour’s election machine. Lloyd Russell-Moyle has been suspended after a complaint and will not be eligible to stand for his seat, Brighton Kemptown. Faiza Shaheen, who came within a whisker of defeating Iain Duncan Smith in 2019 in Chingford and Woodford Green, has also been deselected.

There is a certain steely logic in replacing the two younger candidates. But the cull of a 70 year-old woman who was re-elected by her constituents with 75% of the vote in 2017 and 70% in 2019 seems bizarre.

The argument for cancelling Abbott is predicated on the simple premise that Labour must do whatever it takes to get into government. If there is collateral damage, to coin a phrase, so be it. Perhaps the way Abbott was dealt with was a cock-up. In any case it will soon be forgotten.

But what lingers are questions bigger than Abbott – or for that matter Ken Clarke or David Gauke, who were also booted out of the Tory party for electoral advantage.

Is there really not enough room in our public discourse for shades of opinion? Who will speak for the voiceless? And was the only way of arriving at a consensus to throw this elder stateswoman under a bus.

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