Member News
An outspoken veteran 1980s left-winger and a mass of contradictions, Diane Abbott was one of the first four black MPs to arrive on the Labour benches in 1987, and the first black woman.
Twenty-three years later, despite never having served on the front bench in either government or Opposition, she stunned Westminster by announcing that she would stand for the leadership of the Labour Party.
And she just succeeded in getting enough nominations from MPs to get on to the ballot paper; helped by the last minute withdrawal of the other left-wing candidate John McDonnell, and the nominations of her rival David Miliband and the acting Leader Harriet Harman, who had previously said she would remain neutral in the contest.
A diehard critic of New Labour and especially Tony Blair, she had spent most of the previous thirteen years attacking her own government and continued the attacks in her campaign.
Announcing her candidature on the Today programme, she said she was getting support from women and left-wing and ethnic minority MPs, and criticised the other contenders for being white and male, saying: “They all look the same.”
She called for a return to traditional Labour values after thirteen years of rule by the New Labour “faction”. She performed well at hustings and in sympathetic interviews by sympathisers, but tended to hector when subjected to close scrutiny. Faced with the prospect of coming last, she accused David Miliband of trying to “buy” the leadership contest.
She made a particular mark during eight years on the Treasury Select Committee, where she was an aggressive questioner, and not afraid to criticise her own side. She moved to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee from 1997 to 2001, where she claimed she was pressurised over the Sierra Leone enquiry. But she has not sat on a select committee since 2001.
A passionate and colourful speaker, sometimes accused of going over the top, she supports feminist causes, black sections within the Labour Party and working-class issues. She frequently denounces racial discrimination, saying Britain had invented racism, but was accused of it herself when she said the NHS employed too many blonde Finnish nurses.
She has been vocal and controversial in her remarks on black-on-black violence and the under-achievement of black boys at school.
Her politics sometimes trumps her feminism: she described her parliamentary sisters Hazel Blears, Caroline Flint, Beverley Hughes and Patricia Hewitt as “vestal virgins dedicated to the cult of Blair.”
She often impresses even her political opponents with her oratory, as with a speech against 42-day detention of terrorist suspects in 2008, for which she won the Spectator’s “Parliamentary Speech of the Year award.
She heads, at least alphabetically, almost every list of Labour dissidents in the division lobbies. She opposed the first Gulf War, military intervention in Bosnia and Iraq, and in Afghanistan in 2001. She voted against the war in Iraq, against single-parent benefit cuts and the abolition of student grants, and rebelled over the predatory pricing of Murdoch newspapers.
She opposed cuts in invalidity benefit in the Welfare Reform Bill in 1999 and a year later voted to restore the link between pensions and earnings.
She chalked up sixty-eight rebellions in the Parliament of 2001-05. She rebelled against the government's measures against terrorism, including detention without trial. And of course she joined the big rebellion over university tuition fees. She voted against the closure of post offices, and ID cards. Apart from her rebellions, however, she was on the Chief Whip's list of those with a poor voting record.
Indeed tuition and fees have been a pair of Achilles heels for her: in 2003 she came under heavy criticism from colleagues and disdain from opponents for sending her son to the fee-paying City of London Boys’ School. This was after she had criticised her fellow MP Harriet Harman for sending hers to a selective grammar school.
She said it had been her son’s choice, but that she could not defend the indefensible, even if it cost her her seat. There was little danger of that. In 2005 there was a swing of nearly 11 per cent against her, but there was a swing back against the trend in 2010 and she almost doubled her majority.
She has been a regular guest on television programmes, notably on late-night political shows, partnering (and flirting with) the former Tory minister Michael Portillo. The fees helped with her son’s education, but in 2004 she was forced to apologise to the House of Commons for failing to declare fees of £17,300. She also writes for the Evening Standard and The Voice newspaper and gives occasional lectures.
She was sympathetic to Ken Livingstone in his bid to become Mayor of London, but could not campaign for him as he was standing against the official Labour candidate. Livingstone appointed her as his adviser on women and equality.
After many attempts she was elected to Labour's National Executive Committee in 1994 and served until 1997.
A CND supporter, she had previously opposed Neil Kinnock's rejection of unilateralism. She naturally voted against the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons in 2007.
She is a fairly regular speaker and questioner, often on immigration and asylum, and chairs all-party groups on race and community, tribal peoples and the Caribbean.
In 2006 she called for a ban on the traditional Mummers Day at Padstow in Cornwall, in which local people blacken their faces and dance and sing for charity.
Outraged over the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s admission that she would not feel safe walking the streets of Hackney at night, she led a delegation of MPs on a late evening stroll through her constituency, somewhat to the bemusement of the residents.
She tabled an amendment to the 2008 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to extend rights to abortion to Northern Ireland, though most Northern Ireland MPs opposed it.
Born in 1953, daughter of a Jamaican welder and a psychiatric nurse, she went to Harrow County Girls' Grammar School, where she played Lady Macduff to Michael Portillo's Macduff in a joint production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with the boys' school.
She read history under Simon Schama at Newnham College, Cambridge and says Cambridge made her a socialist. Before becoming an MP she worked for the Home Office, Thames Television, TV-AM and the National Council for Civil Liberties, along with Harriet Harman, Patricia Hewett and Paul Boateng. She voted for the smoking ban in 2006.
In 1991 she married an architect, David Thompson, but she was divorced from him within two years. She said her feminism had been modified by the birth of their son. At his christening in the Commons crypt chapel the then Tory MP Jonathan Aitken, her parliamentary pair and former TV-AM colleague, acted as godfather. He later endorsed her leadership bid.
Have your say...
Please enter your comments below.