‘Parliament was the most overpoweringly male place I had ever worked’: Diane Abbott on becoming an MP, dating Jeremy Corbyn and media intrusion – exclusive extract
On her election as Britain’s first black female MP
When I stepped into parliament for the first time as an MP on 17 June 1987, it was a little like the first day at school. While I may have sounded coherent, I was still in a bit of a daze from the night I’d been elected. Of course that didn’t mean I had not thought carefully about what I was going to wear. For such an important occasion I wanted a unique outfit, so I commissioned a skirt suit made to measure from a satin material. The jacket was of fabric that the dressmaker herself had designed, blue with a swirly pattern that was reminiscent of African textiles. The skirt and the lapels of the jacket were black, and I finished off the look with a gold-coloured neckpiece and large gold earrings, with my hair styled in shoulder-length braids. Bernie Grant – the new MP for Tottenham – wore a spectacular agbada, a long, flowing traditional west African robe; we made an eye-catching pair. Our MP friends, including Jeremy Corbyn, made a point of coming up to us, perhaps innocently trying to be friendly, but I always had a slight suspicion that they wanted to be in the iconic, history-making photographs.
On my first day in the House of Commons I sat in the seat where Enoch Powell always used to sit, which felt appropriate. Despite the bravado of my outfit that day, in the weeks to come I sat on the green benches in the chamber of the House of Commons scarcely able to believe that I was an MP. Everything about parliament was designed to overawe and bring home to a young Black woman that somebody like me was not supposed to be there. They did not even have Black waitresses. The architecture was intimidating: the building was constructed in 1870 in the gothic revival style, with 1,100 rooms, 100 staircases, three miles of passageways, innumerable dining rooms, bars and a smoking room. There was even a rifle range.
More intimidating was the fact that round every corner were attendants wearing black tailcoats, who took even longer than our MP colleagues to become accustomed to the Black newcomers. Bernie, Paul Boateng and Keith Vaz could not have looked more different, yet they were regularly confused with one another (though any such confusion was avoided in the cloakroom, which had a named hanger for each MP). When I was first elected, every hanger had a long loop of red ribbon, which was traditionally for MPs to hang their swords from, never mind that no one had worn a sword in parliament for 700 years – it just went to show how long it can take parliament to adapt to change.
The wider world also had difficulty adjusting to the idea that Black people could be MPs. By this time my brother was a civil engineer and, not long after my election, when attending an Institution of Civil Engineers dinner at the House of Lords, he mentioned in passing to a fellow diner that his sister worked in parliament. “So she works in the kitchen?” came the reply.
The rituals and language of parliament took a lot of getting used to, and parliament itself had the feel of an old-fashioned gentlemen’s club. In some ways it had always been one. Historically, parliament has been a part-time job organised to facilitate working in business or practising as a lawyer. The House of Commons begins its debates in the middle of the day precisely in order to give MPs time to do much of their work before coming in. The hours were particularly convenient for lawyers. What mainly contributed to the sense of a gentlemen’s club was that it was the most overpoweringly male place I had ever worked in. I had attended an all-girls’ grammar school and had moved on to Newnham, an all-female Cambridge college, before working with a fair number of women during my time in the media. In parliament, however, the numbers of men were overwhelming. The most powerful female presence in the House of Commons was the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; needless to say, she and I had completely different political perspectives. In 1987, out of 650 members of parliament, there were only 41 women. As a Black woman, I was of course completely on my own: just me, out of 650.
Dating Jeremy Corbyn
It was not inevitable that I would join the Labour party. Many Black politicos of my generation steered clear of it, believing the left tended to subordinate the politics of race to class politics. Instead, Black political activists of the 70s and 80s devoted themselves to community politics. If I had not been in a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, I might have drifted away from Labour, but he drew me in and infected me with his love and enthusiasm for the party. I had never met anyone so absorbed by it. By day he was a full-time official for the National Union of Public Employees, the predecessor trade union to Unison. His evening and weekend hours were taken up with being a Labour councillor in the north London borough of Haringey. Whatever spare time Jeremy had was consumed by being a volunteer organiser in various local Labour campaigns, and I could not help but get caught up in his whirlwind of activism.
In the summer of 1979 we went on a camping holiday in the south of France. We travelled by motorbike and, Jeremy being Jeremy, it was a socialist motorbike, an East German model. It broke down regularly on our trip south, which I found rather irritating, but lovingly repairing his motorbike by the side of the road was Jeremy’s happy place. When we reached the campsite I perked up. As well as enjoying the French countryside, I was looking forward to some delicious Gallic cuisine. I was horrified when Jeremy unpacked his motorbike saddlebags to reveal a week’s supply of instant macaroni and other processed foods. After much discussion back and forth, I was able to argue for at least one restaurant lunch.
At Christmas that same year I learned where Jeremy got his personal austerity from. We spent the festive season with his mother and father, who lived in a pretty cottage in Shropshire. They were a lovely couple who could not have been kinder or more welcoming to me, but they practised true socialist frugality. I was used to jolly Jamaican Christmases, with all the customary foods (though better seasoned), plus all the Caribbean specialities, including rice and peas (with scotch-bonnet peppers, pimento, thyme, garlic and coconut milk), spicy stewed chicken, curried goat and rum cake. To drink, there would be a ruby-red sorrel drink made with hibiscus petals and spices; and my favourite Caribbean drink, carrot juice with lashings of condensed milk, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon and a touch of rum. There would also be plenty of alcohol on the Christmas table. Christmas at Jeremy’s family home was quite different, his mother and father being more abstemious, moderate consumers to a fault. Dinner seemed mostly about boiled vegetables; a turkey was their sole concession to the festive season. The house was freezing and there was no alcohol.
Around that time I began to realise that, realistically, ours was not a match made in heaven. We were too different. I had a range of interests and enjoyed reading and the theatre, but Jeremy was 99% absorbed in party politics. The only other thing I remember him spending time on was growing vegetables in his back garden. Once, after I lamented our lack of social activity as a couple, he pondered it for a few days and told me we were going out. Feeling excited, I dressed up nicely and we bundled into the car. I had no idea where we were going – perhaps a nice wine bar? It turned out Jeremy’s idea of a social outing was to drive me to Highgate cemetery and proudly show me the tomb of Karl Marx.
Our affair continued for a short while longer, conducted mainly in between attending meetings, before gradually collapsing. It was not an acrimonious split; Jeremy does not do acrimony. A couple of our mutual friends – Bernie Grant and Islington councillor Keith Veness – helped me move my belongings out of Jeremy’s house. There were no regrets for either of us: for me, meeting Jeremy in 1978 had steered my political life in a new direction, and for that I was grateful.
The row over her son’s schooling
In 2003, I took the very difficult decision to send my son James to the City of London school, a private institution. It was an extraordinary move for someone on the left of politics, especially someone who had campaigned so hard around Black underachievement in schools, as I had. I discussed the matter with James first, and in the end I gave him the choice. The story broke in the Mail on Sunday. That morning I got out of bed as usual to make breakfast for James and casually looked out of my bedroom window. To my horror, I saw a whole crowd of Fleet Street photographers on my doorstep. It was the first time the press pack had laid siege to me in my home in this way, and it frightened me. If I could have run away, I would have done, but any escape was impossible without going through that crowd of photographers with their flashbulbs. I had to stay perfectly calm and pretend nothing untoward was happening, because I did not want to upset my son.
To my surprise, one of the first people to phone me that morning, with the media in uproar, was my old National Council for Civil Liberties colleague Harriet Harman. Over the years we had gradually gravitated to different wings of the Labour party and we did not talk much. I was shocked that she rang to speak to me that morning, but Harriet knew what I was going through. There had been a similar uproar a few years back about her own decision to send her son to a selective grammar school. Harriet was reassuring and sympathetic, and insisted I should not give up my campaigning for Black children and the issue of underachievement in schools. “If you don’t do it,” she said, “nobody else will.”
Harriet was the type of feminist who would always reach out to another woman in difficulty. Unlike other people in the Westminster bubble, she understood that I had taken my decision in the full knowledge that it would be very damaging to me personally, precisely because all my education work had shown me how the state school system was letting down Black boys. The media were uninterested in my experience on the matter, and even derided the very idea that James could achieve academically. The underlying narrative was that everyone knew Black boys were destined to fail in school.
I received volumes of abuse in the media and online, and the worst moment came when my son was at home one evening, with the babysitter upstairs. He was listening to the radio station LBC and there was a phone-in with a lot of criticism of me. James felt obliged to ring in and speak up for me. It is inexplicable that LBC thought it acceptable to put a young child on air without checking that a responsible adult had agreed to it. I imagine that, for them, my family and I were just media fodder. I will always feel guilty and sad that my 11-year-old son felt he had to wade in to defend his mother. Some of the anger directed at me was from people who genuinely and passionately opposed private education, but much of the abuse came from those who had no interest in schools or education; they were simply happy to have a fresh reason to attack me.