In April 2019, a London commuter, absorbed in her phone, was spotted sipping a mojito on the train. For most, this would be a non-event – a fragment of an ideal day. For Diane Abbott, the first Black woman to be elected as a Member of Parliament in the UK, this was a moment of controversy sparked by a photo published in The Sun, that bastion of civility.
Cut to April 2025, just over six years to the day after the mojito story broke, and I am preparing for my interview with Abbott, taking advantage of her visit to Cambridge to speak at the annual Literary Festival. I ask a few people what we should discuss. The most common response? “Ask about the cocktail!”
Elected to parliament in 1987 as the Labour representative for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, Abbott is now not only the longest serving Black MP in the UK but also the longest serving female MP – bestowing on her the dubious parliamentary honorific, Mother of the House. Through her political career, she has been a champion of women’s rights, education, and more humane immigration policies.
Oft-cited as an example of her unwavering commitment to defending the rights of the disenfranchised is her ‘42-days Detention’ speech which Abbott gave in 2008 in opposition to her own party’s proposed extension to the pre-charge detention period for those suspected of involvement in terrorist activity. Named the ‘Parliamentary Speech of the Year’ by The Spectator, this moment of opposition exemplifies Abbott’s own political philosophy: “a test of parliament is that we are willing to stand up for the civil liberties of the marginalised, the suspect, and the unpopular.”
How, then, does a person’s career which can only be described as trailblazing get condensed into the scandalous, the sensational, and, most of all, the trivial? How does a single drink come to define a legacy?
Troy: Your memoir, A Woman Like Me, was published last year but I’m sure that this wasn’t the first time that you had been asked to write about your life and political career. What was it about the last few years that made you feel like this was the right time to tell your story?
Diane: It just felt like an appropriate time because I’d been in parliament for, I think, 37 years at that point, and it seemed like a point to look back at my life – and not just the politics, actually. I think people buy or read the book, and they imagine it’s going to be all about politics, but I wanted to talk about my family and growing up as part of the West Indian community. I wanted to talk about that, as well as politics.
Troy: How was that process of reflection?
Diane: Well, first of all, I realised, which I hadn’t realised before, that for the first 10 years of my career, I’d been the only Black woman MP. I’d never really thought about that. I also realised how some of the negativity that I’ve encountered has been to do with race.
There’s an episode very early in the book where I’m at school – it’s a grammar school, you know? – and they took us on a coach outing to Cambridge. I just fell in love with it, but nobody in my family had been to university and both my parents had left school at 14. And then back in the day, to go to Cambridge, you had to do a special exam. If you were doing an art subject, you had to do Latin. And so, basically, you couldn’t do it without the support of your school. I think the outing might have been on a Friday or at the weekend, but on Monday I came into school and I spoke to my History teacher at the end of the lesson. I said, “I want to do the Oxford and Cambridge exam.” And she looked at me and she said, “I don’t think you’re up to it.” And I said, “But I do and that’s what matters, isn’t it?” It’s only looking back, I realise, that what she was trying to say was that Black girls like you don’t go to Cambridge.
In spite of the prevailing atmosphere of racism, Abbott did make it to Cambridge where she studied History at Newnham College. When she talks about her time at the University, Abbott speaks as if still amused by the oddities of the place.
Any visitor to Cambridge can tell you that it’s a town marked by weird customs: it is not everywhere that a gown-wearing 19-year-old hurtling at you on an electric scooter, like a possessed bat, can produce a near death experience. An episode made no less worse having spent the afternoon coughing dust in a library that felt near Biblical in age. The perversities of Cambridge were no less bizarre in Abbott’s time at the University where something as (seemingly) simple as what to wear can be a source of great confusion.
Diane: At the time, my then boyfriend’s mother had bought yards and yards of green polyester, and yards and yards of brown polyester, and she made all of these outfits. So, I had a green polyester suit and green polyester trousers to go with it. Two sets of clothing in polyester. And my mother went around various street markets and got nice jumpers to wear. When I got to Cambridge, nobody was dressed like that. They were wearing jeans and cheesecloth. That was a bit of a shock.
That was the thing about Cambridge. I mean obviously it’s challenging, but the biggest challenge wasn’t the academic side: it was the whole social side. I had a friend who said, when he first saw me, he’d never seen anybody so green.
Troy: How did these experiences influence you?
Diane: Cambridge taught me not to be intimidated by people. That was the thing it really taught me, and it’s also taught me for better or worse, that I was as good as anybody else.
Troy: Is this how you remain resilient in the face of opposition or resistance?
Diane: I suppose I look ahead, you know? I don’t look at what’s happening that day – I look ahead. I think I’m very committed to trying to make the world a better place because the whole thing was that I came from a working class, Jamaican family, and nobody went to university or anything like that. Mummy was a nurse and my father worked in a factory. Then I came to Cambridge and it was like I realised for the first time how divided society was and the gap between rich and poor, which I’d never quite realised before. So Cambridge made me really focus on inequality, not just racial inequality, but inequality generally. That’s one of the things that has been very much part of my politics all the way through.
After leaving University, she spent a brief period working as a Civil Servant in the Home Office – she then left this role to become a Race Relations Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties. Following this, Abbott briefly worked in the broadcasting industry and then for local London Councils which culminated in her becoming Head of Press and Public Relations at Lambeth Council. Alongside this, she was involved in activism work which included attending marches against racism and the apartheid in South Africa.
In total, it would take Abbott roughly 11 years after graduation to capitalise her political work: moving from politics at the local-level to becoming a player in capital-P Politics as a Member of Parliament. However, Abbott’s concern with the realpolitik of activism has remained steadfast throughout her career: from marching and voting against the Iraq War in 2003 to speaking at a protest that was organised in response to racist and misogynistic comments made against Abbott by Frank Hester, a well-known donor to the Conservative Party, in 2024.
In spite of Abbott’s own involvement with various forms of protest, the Labour Party seems committed to introducing new anti-protest measures that were instigated under the previous Conservative Government. The Crime and Policing Bill that is currently going through the House of Commons would, if passed, among other things, ban the use of face coverings at certain protests and make it an offence to climb specified war memorials. Democracy abounds!
Has this crackdown on protest influenced how Abbott is thinking about her own activism?
Diane: Well, it’s difficult to be an activist and engage in protest in the Labour Party, certainly. A lot of activism nowadays is single issue activism like Just Stop Oil. Or it’s in the Greens or, well, it’s in parties other than Labour. So activism and protest isn’t a thing in the Labour Party at the moment because Keir Starmer and the people around him are really stamping on that. But, you know, I think politics is cyclical. I think that a concern for activism and protest will come back because you can’t live in a society like this and not want to protest.
I think the Trump thing, you know, the United States, the effect it has is going to make things worse. So, I’m confident that activism and protests will come back inside the Labour Party, and be more legitimate inside the Labour Party. But at the moment, I think you would have to be in a single issue campaign. Or maybe another party.
Troy: This evening (26th April) there’s a protest happening in Cambridge in response to the recent Supreme Court judgment on the Gender Equality Act. I think a lot of people are feeling increasingly disillusioned with politics not least, in this instance, because we’re seeing figures like Keir Starmer wholeheartedly support the judgement regardless of what it means for transgender and gender-diverse people. So, I’m wondering first, how you feel about that issue specifically, and second, how you feel about the fact that Labour seems to be increasingly catering to the wrong 1%.
Diane: I think the Labour Party is looking over their shoulder at Reform. We’re catering to the wrong 1% and the risk is that we’re alienating young people, but also come the general election people that should be Labour people will either just stay home or vote Green. And it’s because we seem to be so lacking in idealism. We’re so busy, you know, we’re so busy catering for the wrong 1% that we no longer appeal to the idealist – and we are not trying to lead public opinion.
If all you ever do is follow public opinion, follow what they’ve got in the Daily Express and in the Daily Mail, you wouldn’t have a National Health Service. You wouldn’t have same sex marriage. You wouldn’t have abortion. Sometimes, politicians have to lead.
Troy: How do you find a balance between leading at a national level whilst representing the interests of the constituents that have voted you in?
Diane: Even if I don’t vote against the government, I want to be a voice for my constituents. On the one hand, you’ve got a national party which is more command and control than I’ve ever seen. And one of the things is that they have a very tight grip on the parliament. What they did was put in people who they thought were going to be 101% loyal. I think they’re gonna find out that that sort of person – a person who is more concerned about engaging with a national party and building their career, but is not so engaged with working locally and getting to know local people – they’re going to find that problematic. The Tories will pull themselves together, and we don’t have a bigger proportion of the vote than we had under Jeremy Corbyn and there’s a number of seats where I think the votes will not do well.
There’s also things that we’ve done since we’ve come in: the winter fuel allowance for the elderly, refusing to lift the two child limit on child benefit, and, more recently, all these cuts for the disabled. And you don’t have to be very left wing to think, that’s not why I vote Labour.
I think we’re going to have to lose a general election before the party under Starmer, or under whoever it is, decides to think again about its political direction.
Troy: Throughout this conversation you’ve suggested that the biggest influence on this new direction has been a kind of Reform insurgence. Do you think this is true?
Diane: I think Reform is the biggest influence, but Starmer himself, people forget that because Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions until 2014, he wasn’t a member of the Labour Party. So when he stepped down from the Crown Prosecution Service, he was parachuted into a Labour seat and it was a safe Labour seat. He didn’t really have to work at that. So, the thing about Keir, in an odd way, is that he doesn’t have that much experience of the Labour Party at a grassroots level. That’s an influence as well, I think: he doesn’t have a sense of the party to weigh up.
Abbott’s distaste for Keir Starmer is no secret. In an interview with Elizabeth Day in 2024, for the ‘How to Fail’ podcast, Abbott stated that she had “never had a nice chat” with the Labour leader. Part of this disdain seems to have been driven by the apparent attempt to stop Abbott from running as a Labour candidate in the 2024 General Election. Even in the past week, following the catastrophic results for Labour in the local elections, Abbott hit out against the party on ITV News stating that they were taking a “very alarming” direction. So, what is it that keeps her going in spite of this?
Diane: Oh, because I’ve lived through real change.
I mean, one of the things that I campaigned against a lot before I became an MP was the apartheid in South Africa. Actually, we did get rid of apartheid. And the whole civil rights movement in America – you know, we’ve now got Trump – but, again, we’ve made progress on that.
So I’ve seen things that I’ve campaigned on move forward, I suppose. That’s what makes me hopeful.
The Camera 