Labour’s knight in shining armour versus the queen of the Left: she wins

If you are not a Labour supporter – which, even now, a few readers of this column may not be – you probably do not feel instinctive sympathy for Diane Abbott. Sir Keir Starmer’s calculation was that most floating voters he is courting lack that sympathy and would therefore support him in preventing her candidacy in this general election.

His calculation might have been right. Sir Keir is a late, but fervent convert to the Blairite view that, to succeed, a Labour leader must always defeat, suppress or, at the very least, ignore the wishes of his party’s hard-Left. History suggests this works. But now, in Ms Abbott’s case, we shall never know, because he had to back down.

You can see why Sir Keir thought he could get away with it. His repudiation of his predecessor, in whose shadow cabinet he zealously served, seems to be working. It looks good, to wider public opinion, that he not only marginalised Jeremy Corbyn, but got him out of the Labour Party altogether. It marks a decisive break with the most shameful period in Labour history.

Even if Mr Corbyn succeeds in getting re-elected in Islington North, standing as an independent, he will return to the Commons much as he entered it more than 40 years ago (I remember watching from the press gallery as he came into the chamber tieless, an extreme rarity in those days). Now, as then, he is a burbling, boring bigot with little political weight.

So why is the case of Diane Abbott different? She is, after all, a Corbynista, soft on the IRA, soft on Putin, hard on Israel. Like Mr Corbyn, she has sought to downplay anti-Semitism as a form of racism. It was after she had crassly compared, in a letter to The Observer, prejudice against Jews with that against redheads, that she lost the party whip. “They [Jews] are not all their lives subject to racism,” was how she, incredibly, put it. They could not be, you see, because both Jews and redheads are white.

Personally, I disagree with the often-stated view that Ms Abbott has improved race relations in general. I fear she has helped sour them by being relentlessly negative about white-majority society. I sense that her identification with victimhood has damaged her own happiness. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she was a couple of years above me, I knew her slightly as a warm, ebullient person, enjoying a great university’s many privileges. In later decades, the twinkle diminished. A certain grumpiness appeared.

Nevertheless, it is something to be Britain’s first black woman MP and now the longest-serving black MP of either sex. Unlike almost anyone else in Parliament, Diane Abbott is what you could call pre-commemorated. Her portrait already hangs on the Westminster walls. She is a role model taught in schools. Some of her speeches are anthologised.

By the same token, she has been exceptionally reviled, the biggest single target of hostile social media against MPs. She did not deserve such attacks and has faced them bravely.

Somehow, Sir Keir neglected this psycho-drama. His desire to be rid of Diane Abbott was understandable, but he misread how others react when a powerful white man seems to pick on a black female icon. He also misread her own attitude. She was, until this week, quite prepared to retire. She is 70, and for years has not been very well. Her diabetes affects her powers of concentration and levels of energy.

For all her rebellions, Ms Abbott is what Tories used to call “rank Labour”: couldn’t be anything else, would be shattered if kept out – rather like a Christian denied communion. After 37 years in the House, she was disposed to leave peacefully but only – the key point – with honour. Such a Nunc dimittis was widely expected. Even the tributes paid to her by allies this week had a valedictory note. One such, by Angela Rayner, spoke of Ms Abbott’s right to leave “on her own terms”. Anas Sarwar, the Scottish leader, called her a “historic figure”.

Yet the leadership dishonoured her. The disciplinary investigation into her Observer letter finished in December. She had apologised and done the prescribed two-hour course on how not to be anti-Semitic, yet no release came. This week, she at last got the party whip back, but the unattributable press briefing was that she would no longer be a Labour candidate. Sir Keir said the candidacy decision would be taken by the Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) next week.

This apparent injustice fired up Diane fans and her constituency association. She responded by pre-empting the NEC and announcing to a crowd of supporters that she wanted to be MP “for as long as possible” and “by any means possible”. Her blood was up.

Following Ms Rayner’s public support on Thursday for Ms Abbott’s right to be a candidate, on piled not only the usual suspects, but also several trade unions and Mr Sarwar. Given the NEC timetable of a meeting on Tuesday, there was space for plenty more trouble.

The story would by then have dominated a week of the campaign. Labour’s hard-Left/Gaza mob was finding allies in a much wider section of the party who felt Ms Abbott was being ill-used. Sir Keir decided at Friday lunchtime that concession was the better part of valour. He backed down, so poor old Ms Abbott, having prevailed, must fight yet another election.

This is an exhilarating moment for the Conservatives, who until then had watched helpless as Sir Keir had shot to bits their all-time favourite story – that Labour is a prisoner of its Left.

Instead, Sir Keir looks first ungracious, even vindictive, and then weak. He showed a want of diplomatic skills and took refuge in process (“We must wait for the NEC’s decision”), which never works in the heat of an election campaign. Perhaps Rishi Sunak’s decision to go to the country earlier than expected was a shrewd one after all. The Tories have many more last-minute candidacies to fill than Labour, but it is Sir Keir, not they, who is mishandling the ensuing rows (I use the plural, because he faces a couple of lesser cases too).

I was fascinated by a letter in yesterday’s Times from the unlikely source of Jonathan Aitken, the once-disgraced Conservative minister now redeemed as a clergyman. He has been a friend of Ms Abbott since 1983, when she was an obstreperous union shop steward at TV-AM and he was its chief executive. In Parliament, they were “paired”. Mr Aitken, now the family pastor, is godfather to Ms Abbott’s son, and a close enough friend to visit her in hospital and chat frequently on the phone.

In his letter, Mr Aitken concluded that Sir Keir should either lift the proposed ban on her candidacy or “give her a promise that, if he becomes prime minister, he will nominate her for a life peerage.” It is a piquant thought that all this great Left-wing firebrand really wants is a seat in the House of Lords. I sense he knows the woman he is dealing with much better than Sir Keir does.

When I heard the news of the Starmer capitulation, I rang Mr Aitken for his reaction. He laughed: “Well, given Harriet’s Harman’s retirement, Diane will be the next Mother of the House: I believe she’s interested in bringing a little order to its own disciplinary procedures…”