Diane Abbott, or how I can't help liking someone I feel so sorry for

I’ve always had a soft spot for Diane Abbott, the Member of the British Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington.

Diane Abbott

That’s not because I agree with her on much. I don’t. In particular, I disagree with her apparently blind and unquestioning support for the previous leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. She clings to it today, even though only last December, he led the Party to its worst defeat since 1935.

If I still like her, in spite of everything, it’s partly because she’s a black woman who’s managed to break into a world dominated by white men. It’s partly because she’s passionately committed to her constituents in a deprived area of London. Above all, it’s because she has a certain vulnerability for which I can only feel sympathy.

This was most shockingly shown in an interview she gave during the campaign for the 2017 general election. She offered the figure of £300,000 for Labour’s proposed extra funding of the police force. She later corrected her estimate to about £80 million. Corbyn gave the final correction, to £300 million, or a thousand times what she’d originally claimed.

It later turned out that her confusion was down to her diabetes, not well controlled at the time of her interview. However one criticises someone’s political stance, one can’t criticise her for being ill. Indeed, a more professional party organisation might have spotted her condition and kept her away from the media, but the Corbyn organisation was never anything like professional.

Instead, it let her blunder through some terrible public appearances, and then removed her from frontline campaigning. So what should have been handled discreetly and with care turned into a public sidelining that looked like a punishment. That’s the kind of incompetence that has done Labour so much harm and which I regret she had to suffer.

It should be said that, if it’s unfair to be too harsh about that interview, she has on other occasions shown herself entirely capable of shooting herself in the foot all on her own. But since that must be an acutely painful thing to do, perhaps that should only be another reason for feeling sorry for her.

She left the leading team in Labour once Keir Starmer took over from Corbyn. That means that she attracts less publicity these days. However, she does attract some, and she’s done it again in just the last few days. Not always in a way that shines the most favourable pssible light on her.

I loved what she told a conference, The World Transformed, organised by the pro-Corbyn faction, Momentum. Asked whether it was perhaps time to give the supporters of the new Labour leader the opportunity to prove their worth, now that Corbyn had failed and gone, she was emphatic in rejecting this soft idea:

Give moderates a chance? Don’t be ridiculous.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that ‘moderate’ has become a word of disparagement in certain circles? I’ve always tried to follow the advice of one of my teachers, “Moderation in everything, David, including moderation”.

Abbott clearly doesn’t want the moderates taking over. Which, I suppose, at least has the admirable quality of displaying consistency: the immoderates haven’t finished ruining the party, so they don’t want the moderates back running it.

Her most wonderful recent statement, however, came in an interview she gave to Zoe Williams at the Guardian. It reveals her enduring commitment to Corbyn, of whom she says:

He did his best to be nice to people, to put his arms around them, and they weren’t nice back.

I don’t know. It may be naïve of me, but I find the playground vocabulary endearing. Or at least truthful. It’s obvious that people who are focused on being nice, can’t really spend much time being effective. That may help explain our lousy performance under Corbyn.

But, in any case, I wasn’t all that aware of this niceness of Corbyn’s. I saw, for instance, his supporters enthusiastically campaigning to deselect MPs (i.e. prevent them running for Parliament again) who happened to think Labour couldn’t win an election under his leadership (it had two goes, and failed both times, the second dramatically). I didn’t notice Corbyn leaping in to stop this kind of thing happening or demanding that people be nice to those they disagreed with.

On the other hand, I did see him being extremely nice to Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. 

In the first place, he agreed to the 2019 election being held at a time of Johnson’s choosing, even though it was clear that this could only favour the Tories. And, having made that concession, Corbyn ran an inept political campaign, on a manifesto that was simply a jumble of promises of anything anyone might ever want and a slogan no one can remember. It was – no, heck, I’ve forgotten – but I do remember Johnson’s, which was ‘Get Brexit Done’. It was a crass lie, but it was simple, easy to remember and a rallying call to just the people the Tories needed for victory – and, lo and behold, they emerged with an 80-seat majority.

Well, that was certainly nice. Not to our side, sadly. Not to Diane Abbott, even, who lost her chance to move from Home Affairs spokesperson to Home Secretary. But terribly nice to the other side. And she’s right: Johnson has never been nice back.

Being nice to the wrong people? Yes, that’s what the immoderates’ regime was all about. Poor Diane, wrong as usual, can’t see why that leaves us moderates deeply disinclined to give them another go.