Diane Abbott was a firebrand – what happened?

No-one has ever described Diane Abbott as a riddle or a mystery, let alone an enigma. If ever an MP were frustratingly – or, if you prefer, reassuringly – predictable, it’s her. Abbott’s views on Jeremy Corbyn, Margaret Thatcher, women’s rights and the Windrush scandal, not to mention the irresistible temptation felt by every Londoner to crack open a gin-in-a-tin on the Overground home, have long seemed immutable.

Now 70 years of age, and holding in Parliament the title Mother of the House on account of her 34 years of service, Abbott is publishing a memoir, A Woman Like Me. It plots the trajectory of a bright girl, growing up in north-west London with a difficult home life, actively discouraged by her grammar-school teachers from applying to Oxbridge, but pressing ahead regardless and being accepted to Newnham College Cambridge, where she was one of just three non-white undergraduates. After a stint as a civil servant and as a broadcast journalist for TV-am, she entered politics, and in 1987 became the first black female MP, before, in 2016, reaching the heights of Shadow Home Secretary.

Abbott has never served in government, and likely never will. Keir Starmer, never a fan, had replaced her in that post long before Labour returned to power this year. But her public profile must be the envy of many a member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. That profile is, admittedly, a polarising one: a bête noire of the Right, and increasingly of the centre-Left, there’s a version of Abbott to suit every political shade. She’s revered as an elder stateswoman by the wider black community, being by some distance their longest-serving parliamentarian; she’s derided by her opponents for her poor grasp of detail, as when she once seemed confused about Labour’s pledge for 10,000 extra police officers for England and Wales, improvising with a figure that meant new officers would cost just £30 a head. She’s generally seen as either wilfully stubborn or ideologically pure – it’s in the beholder’s eye.

What’s incontrovertible, however, is that for years she has received, in person and online, a level of abuse that would have broken a woman of less steely resolve. Abbott, to be clear, has her own history of unpleasant comments, and was suspended by Labour only last year after writing to the Observer to suggest that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people hadn’t suffered racism “all their lives”. It was not her first foray into rhetoric widely seen as divisive, bizarre, or at worst bigoted.

Nonetheless, she has long been, and shamefully continues to be, a lightning rod for racism and misogyny. A case in point were the disgraceful scenes in the House of Commons this March. A scandal, quite rightly, blew up over historic quotes of the Conservative donor Frank Hester, who said that looking at Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and that the MP “should be shot”. As his remarks were being debated, Abbott stood up no fewer than 46 times requesting to speak; the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, ignored her. Would a white male colleague ever have been treated with such disrespect?

Abbott’s career is familiar to me: she’s my local MP in Hackney North & Stoke Newington, the safest of safe Labour seats. (Her vote share has never been lower than 48 per cent, and peaked in 2017 at 75 per cent.) On the stump, she is forceful and disarmingly reasonable – or she was in her heyday. Many locals have thought for some time that she ought to retire on health grounds. She suffers from Type 2 diabetes, and lately has seemed shaky at public appearances. It was widely rumoured that Starmer wanted her removed before this year’s election, which made her feel, she said this week, like a “non-person” – but despite the best efforts of Labour’s moderates, Hackney North is a hotbed of radicalism. Abbott chose to stay, and she won again.

When a copy of A Woman Like Me landed on our doormat, my husband – a Labour Party member, though not a Left-leaning one – swooped on it, specifically to see what Abbott had written about her ex-boyfriend, Jeremy Corbyn. Was there truth to the rumours of a late-1970s motorbike tour of the DDR’s nudist camps? Sadly, we’ll never know. All we learn from this book is that young Jeremy had a beard but eschewed tie-dye for a “staid” tieless shirt, and that while they lived together, he didn’t have much room in his heart for a relationship. “Jeremy was 99 per cent absorbed in party politics,” Abbott writes. “The only other thing I remember him spending time on was growing vegetables in his back garden.” Corbyn and Abbott parted after she lamented their lack of a social life, prompting him to take her on a day trip – to visit the tomb of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery.

That final date constitutes a rare personal anecdote in a curiously bloodless autobiography, which lacks the fire you might expect from a woman so determined, for decades, to blaze her own trail. Perhaps Abbott was channelling dignified restraint when she committed her thoughts to paper, but A Woman Like Me reads like a rush job, written and published in haste. It’s largely devoid of the agile intelligence and blistering indignation that once marked its author out as a star in the making.

When her wry humour surfaces, however, it’s immediately refreshing. Back in 1979, Abbott recalls, while working at the National Council for Civil Liberties – since renamed Liberty – she had a fling with a married man, a television executive. “I was young and reckless and I imagine it was not his first extramarital relationship,” she writes. “One day as we were lying in bed together after making love, he said idly I would make a good television researcher.

“I was not yet experienced enough to understand that men say that sort of thing when they are having an affair with you. Had my lover been a cattle breeder, he might well have asserted that I would be great at breeding cattle.” I’m no fan of Diane Abbott’s politics, but the livestock industry’s loss was democracy’s gain.

A Woman Like Me is published by Viking at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books