Nevertheless, she persisted. That old millennial feminist rallying cry springs to mind repeatedly on reading Diane Abbott’s absorbing new autobiography, which describes a life of astonishing resilience. Her teachers thought a working-class black girl wouldn’t get into Cambridge, but she persevered and proved them wrong – only to be mistaken at one college ball for the hired help. She battled through multiple rejections before finally landing the Hackney seat that made her Britain’s first (and for many years only) black female MP, and then through the impossible pressures of being a single mother in parliament in the days of endless late sittings and no childcare. (Once, in desperation, she voted with her two-week-old son strapped to her, only for a Tory MP to complain that it was bad enough having David Blunkett’s guide dog around, never mind babies.) Frozen out by Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for her uncompromisingly leftwing views, she was sacked from her first frontbench job under Ed Miliband (which she secured by running unsuccessfully against him for the leadership) for publicly attacking his immigration policy.
But nevertheless, she persisted, staging a late comeback as shadow home secretary under Jeremy Corbyn only to be forcibly “stood down” from his 2017 election campaign after a fumbled radio interview. (She was ill at the time, she writes, and only learned of her unceremonious benching from the media.) Through it all she has endured decades of horrific racist and misogynistic abuse, only to lose the whip herself for a shockingly ill-judged letter sent to this newspaper implying that the “prejudice” suffered by Jews, Irish people and Travellers was not the same as the racism endured by black people. Yet here she still is, triumphantly re-elected aged 70, despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts. Whatever you make of Abbott, the story of what she overcame to get here offers fascinating insights into both the overtly racist Britain of her childhood – when young men would go door to door seeking black families to beat up – and the sometimes flawed but compelling politician it produced.
