Diane Abbott has spoken out against Labour leader Keir Starmer, accusing him of failing to offer support following vile and threatening comments made by Conservative donor Frank Hester.
Abbott, a longstanding Labour MP for Hackney, revealed her deep disappointment with Starmer’s lack of personal outreach after Hester’s comments suggested she should be shot and incited hatred against Black women.
The comments from Hester, which have ignited outrage, left Abbott fearing for her safety. Reflecting on the fatal attacks on MPs Jo Cox and David Amess in recent years, Abbott explained how Hester’s words stirred real fear.
“One of the reasons it made me frightened is two MPs have been killed in recent years,” she remarked, referring to the brutal deaths of Cox in 2016 and Amess in 2021. Abbott further emphasized the dangerous consequences of such inflammatory remarks, stating that comments like Hester’s “wind up a certain sort of nutcase and it makes you more vulnerable.”
Abbott had expected more than silence from the leadership of her party. According to her, Starmer never reached out to check on her wellbeing or offer any advice on her safety in the wake of the comments.
“If somebody was threatening to have you shot, you would have felt your party would have offered you more support, giving you advice on safety and security, even kind of commiserated with you. And none of that happened.”
Starmer’s Silence Disappoints Abbott
Abbott has not held back in expressing her feelings of betrayal by the Labour party’s leadership. “My friends came round, but my friends have always been terribly supportive. Sadly, I didn’t get much support from Keir Starmer,” she lamented.
The MP, who has been a consistent voice on social justice issues, seemed genuinely hurt by Starmer’s lack of response, saying, “I was a little bit hurt because if you are threatened with death, you expect your party to come round.”
Suspended from Labour for a controversial letter she wrote regarding the nature of racism, Abbott acknowledged that her actions had been misguided.
In the letter, she suggested that Jewish, Irish, and Traveller communities were subject to prejudice, not racism. While Abbott admits her mistake, she believes that her suspension was politically motivated and served as an opportunity for Starmer to sideline her from the party’s left faction.
“I think that Keir Starmer wanted to finish his clearout of the left in the parliamentary Labour party and by writing a very ill-advised letter I gave him the opportunity to move against me,” Abbott claimed.
Abbott accused Starmer of strategically delaying the investigation into her letter. By stretching out the process, she believes Starmer aimed to block her from running as a Labour candidate in the next general election.
“I think what they were trying to do was to string out and string out the investigation. So when a general election is around the corner, they could just move me out of the way,” she said.
Abbott suggested that Starmer’s ultimate aim is to rebrand the Labour Party by removing longstanding figures like herself. “Keir Starmer is always saying: ‘It’s the new Labour party’… and how could you make it look more new than by getting rid of Diane Abbott?” she added.
Frank Hester, whose comments set off the entire controversy, has since apologized for his remarks, describing them as “rude”. In his apology, Hester insisted his criticism of Abbott was not based on her race or gender. He explained that his experience of discrimination as a child of Irish immigrants had shaped his views on racism, which he claimed to abhor.
Nonetheless, Abbott maintains that Hester’s remarks and Starmer’s silence in the face of such hostility have left her feeling isolated and abandoned by the party she has long served.
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