Ms Abbott was suspended by Labor in April 2023. Photo: RII SCHROER/Rii Schroer
Had her ex-boyfriend Jeremy Corbyn won an unlikely victory in 2019, Diane Abbott would have become the country's first black home secretary. Instead, she now seems destined to leave politics altogether – after a failed attempt to get her out of parliament with any dignity.
Abbott, 70, was suspended by the Labor Party in April 2023 following comments she made in a newspaper article that Jews experienced lower levels of racism than black people.
Incredibly, Sir Keir Starmer insisted on investigating this matter. her behavior continued despite the passage of 13 months, but with the election five weeks away, Ms Abbott had to make a decision about whether she could stand as a Labor candidate.
Sir Keir Starmer's team wanted to give her a “soft landing” so she could “go with dignity”, party sources said. They decided to reinstate the Labor Party whip in the hope that it would then announce its retirement.
But someone in the Labor Party had other ideas and on Tuesday they told the media she would be banned from standing as a Labor Party member. candidate in July. Ms Abbott said on Wednesday morning she was “dismayed” by the ban, prompting a backlash from supporters including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who said the pioneering MP should be “given the respect she deserves”.< /p> 
Sir Keir's team is said to have wanted to allow Ms Abbott to “exit with grace”. Photo: Peter McDiarmid/Getty Images
The day Sir Keir's team had set out to break the Conservatives' record on the NHS instead turned into a day of chaos – as Labor seemed unable to decide whether it was true.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said he was “not particularly” happy with how Ms Abbott was treated, and Sir Keir later said “no decision was made to stop her” – but does that mean she will be approved as a candidate remains unclear.
Jess Phillips, a former Labor Party leadership candidate, said Ms Abbott should be able to stand, although she added to the confusion by saying: “Just because you have a Labor whip doesn't mean you have a whip from the Labor Party. This means that the Labor Party considers you a good MP.”
Martin Ford CC, who wrote a report on racism in the Labor Party, said the lack of transparency over the decision on Ms Abbott was “deeply worrying”. The Tories said Sir Keir's refusal to suspend her showed his weakness, while Jess Barnard, a member of Labour's ruling National Executive Committee, said the whole thing was a “complete farce”. Still, her future remained unclear.
It was perhaps inevitable that the end of a five-decade career would be accompanied not by gratitude but by recrimination.
Along with Corbyn and John McDonnell, Abbott was one of the few survivors. Members of Parliament from the far left wing of the Labor Party, which in the 1980s sided with the Reds of Ken Livingstone and the late Tottenham MP Bernie Grant.
Regular guest on BBC's Question Time and On this week”, she is one of the most recognizable faces of the Labor Party, but also one of the most controversial. In 37 years she never held a ministerial post as MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington.
Ms Abbott, who was born in Paddington to Jamaican parents, attended Harrow Girls' Grammar School where she appeared in school plays staged at the local boys' school, including a production of Macbeth in which she played Lady Macduff opposite a young girl . Michael Portillo as Macduff.
She went on to study history at Cambridge, then worked for a time at the Home Office before taking a job as a race relations officer at Liberty and a researcher at Thames Television, and later at its breakfast station. show TV people.
Despite her controversial career, Diane Abbott receives continued support from her constituents. Photo: Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images Europe
It was in the late 1970s that she met and had a relationship with Corbyn, who was then an adviser in north London.
In 1984, midway through her four-year tenure as a councilor on Westminster City Council, Ms Abbott gave an interview to a pro-republican magazine in which she expressed support for the IRA and declared that “every defeat for the British state is a victory for us all.”
The following year she began working as a press attaché for Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council until it was abolished by Margaret Thatcher, and in 1987 she was elected to Parliament on her first attempt, becoming Britain's first black female MP.
This was followed by decades of work on select parliamentary committees, including the Treasury, Home Affairs and Foreign Affairs committees, but when New Labor came to power, new controversies saw her overlooked for ministerial roles. She complained that her local hospital should not employ Finnish nurses because they had never met a black person before, and her parliamentary colleague and ally Bernie Grant suggested that Scandinavians probably had no idea how to take a black person's temperature.
Ms Abbott was also opposed to some of New Labour's most important policies, including the upgrade of the Trident nuclear weapons system and the decision to go to war in Iraq.
She was accused of hypocrisy in 2003 , when she decided to send her son James – her only child from a two-year marriage – to a City of London private school, accusing colleagues of making “indefensible” decisions to send their children to selective schools.
Locked on the bench, she resumed her double act with Mr Portillo, appearing with him as a pundit on the short-lived BBC political show This Week. The BBC Trust later decided that she should not have been paid to appear on the show because she was there as a representative of the Labor Party.
However, in 2010 she stood for the leadership of the Labor Party and won the support of 33 MPs before losing to Ed Miliband, who made her shadow public health secretary.
< p>Five years later she was alone one of those who supported Corbyn's leadership bid, and when he unexpectedly won, he appointed her shadow international development secretary, shadow health secretary and then shadow home secretary.
Her performance during the 2017 general election campaign was marred by a series of interviews in which she struggled with the numbers. During an appearance on LBC she gave inaccurate information about how Labour's plan to hire 10,000 extra police officers would be funded and she could be heard shuffling papers. Ms Abbott later revealed that she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes two years ago and that her blood sugar levels were “out of control” when she was interviewed.
In 2019, she reached more one milestone. when she stood in for Mr Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions, becoming the first black MP to appear at the post office during the weekly event.
She then resigned from her frontbench position when Sir Keir Starmer became a Labor member. leader in 2020, and in 2023 a scandal broke out that overshadowed the last year of her career.
In a letter to The Observer, she said Jews, Irish and Travelers do not experience racism “all their lives” in the same way as black people.
She quickly apologized, but Sir Keir, who had promised to cleanse his party of antisemitism, suspended the Labor Party. Ms Abbott was finally reinstated on Tuesday, causing further confusion as even senior ministers were left in the dark about her future.
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