Michael Gove has said remarks made by the Conservative party’s largest donor were “horrific” but were unlikely to be referred to the government’s new extremism taskforce.
The communities secretary said Frank Hester’s comments about the veteran MP Diane Abbott were “racist”, but that he “wouldn’t want to conflate” an individual set of remarks with an extremist ideology.
The Guardian revealed this week that Hester told a 2019 meeting that seeing Abbott on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”.
Gove insisted Hester, who has given £10m to the Conservatives, had shown “full contrition” and should be forgiven.
He told Sky News: “I think that when someone says that they are sorry, and I understand he’s deeply sorry for these remarks, then my natural inclination is to exercise Christian forgiveness.”
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme before launching the government’s new definition of extremism in parliament, Gove said Hester’s remarks were unlikely to be examined by his department’s new counter-extremism centre.
“We have to be clear: we’re looking at organisations with a particular ideology,” Gove said. “The individual concerned said something that was horrific, and as someone who was themselves targeted by an extremist who wanted to kill me and then went on to kill a friend of mine, I take these issues incredibly seriously.”
Gove was one of several MPs identified as potential targets by Ali Harbi Ali before he murdered the Southend West MP David Amess in 2021.
Gove added: “I wouldn’t want to conflate those motivated by an extremist ideology with an individual comment, however horrific, which had quite rightly been called out and which has quite rightly led to an apology.”
The Conservatives are under pressure to return Hester’s donations. In a statement on Monday, Hester’s company said he “accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.
The statement said Hester “abhors racism” and that “he rang Diane Abbott twice today to try to apologise directly for the hurt he has caused her, and is deeply sorry for his remarks. He wishes to make it clear that he regards racism as a poison which has no place in public life”.
Ministers and civil servants will be banned from talking to or funding organisations that undermine “the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy” under the government’s new definition of extremism, which Gove will unveil to MPs on Thursday.
Labour said the new definition raised more questions than answers and was “very unusual”.
Darren Jones, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, told the Today programme: “Clearly, there is a cross-party political consensus that hateful extremism is not welcome in our society, should not be tolerated and action should be taken. So we all agree on the starting position.
“The slight confusion really is that the government has focused on this definition today, which is not in relation to the counter-extremism strategy, which is now nine years out of date, it’s not an action plan for agencies and others about what action they should take in communities across the country. It’s not even a legal definition.
“All it really does is prevent the government from financing organisations or individuals. That rather implies that Michael Gove is worried they’re doing that at the moment, which raises more questions than he’s been able to answer this morning.”
In a piece for the Guardian on Thursday Abbott, who is the UK’s longest-serving black MP, accused the Conservatives of aiming to “play the race card” in the general election.
