Diane Abbott looks good in leopard print. Her jacket is patterned, and when I peer under the table, I am greeted by a pair of matching, leopard print trainers.
We meet at the Cambridge Union, where she has just spoken. The last time she was here was as a student, making a point from the audience. “People were so astonished that a black girl would stand up and say anything in the Union… I just thought, ‘I can do without being patronised’”. She never went back.
She would go on to be the first black woman in parliament, and last year became Mother of the House, the longest continuously serving female MP.
This was in defiance of Labour strategists, who reportedly tried to ban Abbott from standing for the party in the last election. She had been suspended from Labour the year before over a controversial letter about racism to the Observer. She might have stood down as planned, she declared to the Union audience, “but I thought ‘eff you’! If I have to crawl back to parliament on my hands and knees, I’m going back.” The party has often been hostile—leaked messages from a 2020 dossier showed senior Labour staffers calling Abbott “repulsive” and “a very angry woman”.
“Party leaders want MPs that keep quiet,” she says. Abbott is anything but.
She criticises Labour for witholding on lifting the two-child benefit cap (“the single, simplest thing that we could do to fight child poverty”) and calls cuts to disability benefits “pretty shocking”.
Abbott worries about hard-right trends on both sides of the Atlantic. Donald Trump is a “very nasty man”, she says, while Nigel Farage “purports to be the voice of the working man… but he’s a millionaire”.
Labour is in trouble “if all we do is read polls and tell people what we think they want to hear,” she says. “We’re not going to beat Reform by copying Reform… We have to give people something to believe in.”
It’s that idealism that captures why she joined the party, later becoming more deeply involved through dating a young Jeremy Corbyn in the late 1970s. She tells one story with relish: after her complaints about their lack of social activity, young Corbyn eventually got the hint and informed her that they were going out. She got in the car (could it be dancing? Drinks?) and emerged in Highgate Cemetery—where he proudly showed her the tomb of Karl Marx. “That’s Jeremy for you.”
Their relationship might have fizzled out (not as a direct result of cemetery-gate), but she still talks about Corbyn with affection. In between sips of tea, she maintains that an issue during his leadership was “the wing of progressive politics that was determined to smash Jeremy”.
I wonder what motivates her. As the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she says “you had to be extremely resilient”.
“If you’re working class and you become an MP it’s the job your parents always wanted for you. Clean, indoor work, no heavy lifting. So you have to appreciate the fact that you’re in a much more privileged position than your mother and father were.”
She feels “sorry for MPs who don’t believe in anything and just want the status, because you are going to tire yourself very quickly.”
Abbott’s own belief and unyielding hope have characterised her career. “You have to believe that politics is cyclical,” she says.
“I think the price of liberty is eternal vigilance—and if we’re eternally vigilant, I believe there will be a better day.”
It’s what gives her the energy to fight for her party, and the energy to fight it, too.
