Diane Abbott - ‘I’ve never had a nice chat with Keir Starmer’

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0:56Welcome to How To Fail, the podcast that encourages you to look at failure a little differently, not as something that defines you, but potentially as something you can learn from. Before we get to our guest, it would feel remiss of me not to mention our special subscriber bonus podcast, Failing With Friends. This is where my guest stays in the studio a bit longer and answers your questions. And we read out and offer advice on some of your failures too. I also offer my behind the scenes reflections on my interaction with the guest. Here's a bit of Diane Abbott to whet your appetite. If you think you're not going to quite make it, you won't.

1:36I've never believe that I'm not going to make it. And I think that gives you an edge. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my call outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Listen on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa play How to Fail with Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music.

2:03Diane Abbott is a woman of firsts. She was one of the first black babies born in Paddington Hospital, West London, where her mother had to tell the curious nurses that her daughter didn't have a tail, you know. She excelled at school and became the first in her family to attend Cambridge University, as well as the only state-educated black person to study there in the 1970s. After a career that took her to the Home Office and then into television, she joined the Labour Party and became the first Black female MP in 1987. She was the first Black woman to stand for leadership of a major British political party in 2010, the first Black woman to shadow one of the four great offices of state, and the first to take Prime Minister's questions.

2:50Having retained her seat as Labour MP for Hackney this year at the age of 70, she now holds the honorary title Mother of the House as the longest continuously serving female MP. A successful life then, but as becomes clear from her new memoir, A Woman Like Me, not one without its share of challenge. Her parents, Reginald, a welder, and Julia, a nurse, were part of the Windrush generation, and for all her life, Abbott has dealt with horrendous racist and sexist abuse, as well as serious health issues after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2015. The practical barriers I have faced have been great, she writes in A Woman Like Me, and the psychological obstacles sometimes even greater.

3:41In a way, this has always been about feeling the need to prove myself. Diane Abbott, welcome to How to Fail. It's a pleasure to be here. What a life. And it's still going. And I wanted to end on that quote because I do think so many people will be listening to this and see you as such an aspirational role model. And yet what you do so brilliantly in your memoir is that you write really candidly about the struggle that some of it has cost you. Who do you feel the need to prove yourself to? I've always been the only black person in white institutions, whether it was grammar school, whether it was working in television, whether it was in parliament.

4:30So I think I've always felt the need to prove myself to the wider society in the way that only a black person in a white society feels. So you feel the need to prove yourself to white people? It would be wrong to say that I'm intimidated by white people as such, but it is true that I felt the need to prove myself to a wider society which is white. Because one of the things that struck me when I was reading a woman like me is that as a child, you had a strong sense of self. You knew that you wanted to go to Cambridge and you were going to do it and you knew you could do it even though your teachers advised you against it.

5:19It stands to reason that it's not that you're proving yourself to yourself. It feels like you've always known who you are. Yes. And I've always been quite definite about who I am and what I can do. My parents didn't go to university. Both my parents left school at 14. At school, they took us on little coach trips and I went on a coach trip to Cambridge and I was just completely amazed. I remember the coach driving down King's Parade and that's where I could see King's College. I think there was Trinity and I just thought it was so beautiful and so amazing but the thing that impressed me most of all were the students the young people with their striped scarves walking along and to me they looked like princes and princesses and I kept that sense of awe and wonder all the way till I went back to school the next day.

6:19We're going to come on to Cambridge because it feeds into one of your failures but I want to go back to childhood Diane what was she like at age six what was Diane Abbott like? Well my brother would say that I've always been very bossy not even at age six but at age one you know there's a photograph in the book of my brother being christened and I'm standing a little bit ahead of my mother and father and I'm whacking my finger god knows who too and as I say my brother I would say I've always been somebody that likes to take charge. And why did you call it a woman like me? I suppose because I wanted to indicate it was a distinct life experience, distinct from other people who had done the same things.

7:10Do you think that there's a tendency to lump, to use a very inelegant and inaccurate phrase, the black experience to see it as sort of one homogenous whole? Yes, I think there is a tendency to oversimplify what the black experience is. I was writing this morning about Notting Hill Carnival, which is a fantastic artistic event, has often suffered from a tendency to think that all black people are criminals. and so it's policed in a way that similar music festivals like Glastonbury for instance are not policed so that tendency to lump us all together is mostly not to our advantage. When do you think you first became aware of that tendency?

7:59So your parents as you say they left school they came over to the UK as part of the Windrush generation from Jamaica to a racist society. When did you first become aware of that? I didn't become aware of the racism until I went to university because my parents never spoke about race. It's only looking back now I can see how racism affected their lives. When things happened to me, we are clearly in retrospect racist. I just thought people were being strange and silly. I didn't think they were being racist. There was a teacher at school, wasn't there, who said, why do you always have to be so different?

8:42Yes, and again, I just thought that was strange. There was another teacher at school who, when I said I wanted to do the Oxford and Cambridge Entry, said, well, I don't think you're up to it. And again, I just thought that was a random remark. What did you say to her? But I do, and that's what matters, isn't it? Will you tell me a little bit about your grandmother, Miss Dye? I didn't meet her until I was in my early 20s and my mother took me home to visit Jamaica. Although she lived all her life in rural Jamaica, she was also a very dignified and very elegant woman. and whenever I've been in situations where I was nervous or felt a lot of pressure or felt some imminent challenge I always remember my grandmother and how proud she was and how brave she was and that helps me to be proud and brave as well.

9:45And your parents Reginald and Julia now I think what comes across loud and clear already is how intellectually self-sufficient you are But I think you're also emotionally self-sufficient because their relationship was quite fractious, wasn't it? And they split up. And I think you probably had quite a troubled relationship with your father reading between the lines of your memoir. But you don't harp on about it. You made your own way. And I wonder how you feel about your parents now, looking back at the age of 70. My father, who I thought was very unfair, even cruel at some times, he must have absorbed a lot of racism and a lot of unpleasantness in the outside world.

10:37and what he did was bring his rage home. And I didn't understand that then and it's only now I can see that he internalised a lot of painfulness which he couldn't respond to in the outside world because he would have lost his job or whatever but he took it out on us. My mother was different. She was much more caring and much easier to get on with. it was a fractal relationship with my father but I can see why he was the way he was and also he was a decisive influence in my life in one simple way which was when I was born my mother wanted to send me home to Miss Dye to be brought up like most of my cousins were and it was my father that put his foot down and insisted no no she's staying here because I was his first child.

11:34And in a way, had I gone back to Jamaica to be brought up, I'd have had a great time and I've had a great childhood and I probably would have done well in life. But there's no doubt in my mind that had I been sent home to Jamaica to be brought up, I wouldn't be a British MP today. This podcast, as you know, is all about failure. And I'm only too well aware that there are certain people in society who are given multiple opportunities to fail upwards. And there are others who, when they make a mistake, it seems to carry so much more significance because of what they represent. Do you think we are harder on you, Diane Abbott, when you make a mistake than we would be on a white, privately educated male MP?

12:23I'm afraid I have no doubt about that and sometimes I have to remind myself of that because you have a sort of barrage of attacks and denigration in the media which can be very upsetting and I have to remind myself that if I was a white man I would be allowed mistakes but I've never been allowed a mistake. Do you worry about failure and making mistakes now or are you are you past the point of worry? You always worry because of the response you'll get in the media but I anticipate that I'm going to get a very unpleasant response if I make a mistake and I try my best not to make mistakes but sometimes you do slip up.

13:18I sort of want to ask you about the mojito only because it became legendary and and it sort of went viral for the right reasons which was let's leave diane abert alone she's just having a can of mojito and you didn't and you owned that mistake very quickly um but i wonder how you feel about m &s can mojito nowadays oh i still drink it occasionally do you would you recommend well it's great i wouldn't recommend doing it if you're a public figure and in public, but I would recommend it as a drink. It's another thing that you write about in A Woman Like Me, actually, is the rise of celebrity culture and the smartphone making it almost impossible for you to have any kind of private life.

14:04How difficult has that been? I was used to being able to meet with my friends or just relax, enjoy myself. And nowadays, because of the smartphone, you have to be very, very careful what you do publicly. And it took me a little while to adjust to that. And do you feel you've also been pressurised into speaking publicly about things you might have wanted to keep private? For instance, the fact that you have diabetes. I've never wanted to be treated as a victim. And that goes all the way back to childhood. so the reason I didn't want to talk about my health was because of that yeah I didn't like talking about my health not necessarily because I wanted to keep it private but because I didn't want people to feel sorry for me why not if you think of yourself as a victim too often you can hold yourself back.

15:05You can internalise the notion that you are someone who has less opportunities and is entitled to do less things than other people. Let's move on to your failures. Your first failure, so having excelled at school and got into grammar school and in spite of the advice of your dunder-headed teacher, you got into Cambridge to study history. But your first failure is your failure to get a first? Throughout my academic career, I've sailed through, whether it was O-level, whether it was A-level, whether it was doing the Oxford and Cambridge entrance, because in those days, in order to go to Oxford and Cambridge to do an art subject, in other words, a subject which wasn't a scientific subject, you had to do Latin.

15:52Now, fortunately for me, I had done Latin O-level, but the requirement of Latin meant that a lot of other state school children could not have gone in so I did the special exam I did my Latin paper I went for interview I got in so I just had a history from the very young Diane Abbott to the Diane Abbott that got into Cambridge at a time when There are very few working class children going to Cambridge, let alone black children. I had a certain amount of confidence in my ability to sail through academically. And when I didn't get a first at Cambridge, that came as something of a shock. How did you process it?

16:41I processed it as a stage of relatively easy academic success. That stage in my life was over. Did you internalise that failure? Did you see it as a failure of not having worked hard enough, for instance, or was it something else? I felt I had hit the ceiling. But then I went on to apply to join the civil service and I passed that set of exams. My sense of myself as able and successful was restored. It becomes clear reading your autobiography that there were only two other non-white undergraduates at Newnham College at the time that you were there. Yeah. And I wonder if you felt that there was a lack of support for people from diverse backgrounds, because it was so monocultural.

17:44That wasn't what life was like in the 70s. I just took it on myself that I didn't get a first. You also write about having experienced racism while you're at Cambridge with your then-boyfriend, Peter, when you went on a walk one day. Would you mind telling us what happened? He was at Bath and I was at Cambridge, and we used to travel to see each other. And he came to see me at Cambridge, and we were walking back to the station. I think we may even have been walking back hand in hand. And then suddenly some schoolboys lent out of the windows of their school and hurled abuse at me. And both of us were very taken aback.

18:37And that was one of the experiences of racism which stands out in my mind. What did history, your degree, teach you about race? There was nothing that I could study which was about race, either in a British context or an overseas context. And there was nothing about empire. There was nothing. What I was very keen to do afterwards was to read about race and black writers and black poets. It was something I had to compensate for. But then, you know, Oxbridge in those days, there were a lot of issues they didn't touch on in English and history. Well, education has become something that you have campaigned on through the years.

19:28And it's clearly something that's very important to you personally. me one of the bits in the book that I can't stop thinking about is when your father in a in a rage drove away with all of your books and you had loved reading so much and these books are some of your best friends and you never saw them again that was terrible that's one of the reasons why I felt my father was quite harsh we were having I mean he came to Cambridge for my graduation even though I had a relatively bad relationship with my father I thought it was so important that my parents were there, maybe because I was the only one of two black girls at Newnham.

20:07So we came and he started sort of blustering on and being rude generally. I think, well, I know it was because he felt intimidated. He was there in the gardens of Newnham. It was full of the parents and their daughters who all came from very middle-class backgrounds. He was the only black man there and he was reacting to that but I just thought it was my father being difficult anyway we had a sort of skirmish and he came out of my room and he drove off and it wasn't till he had driven off I realized he'd taken all my books with him and I had kept every book I had ever bought all the way to books I had bought as a child and that was probably one of the most coruscating things that he did to me.

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22:03We've touched on the importance of education, not only for you personally, but specifically for black children who are so often overlooked in the state system. Talk to us about sending your son to private school, because I know that there'll be people listening to this who want to hear what you have to say on it and you'll probably sit the back teeth of it and you write about it in the book but just explain that to us. For me education had been a ladder up from the position of working class West Indians of my parents generation and I've never forgotten that and I wanted that for all children particularly black children.

22:46And I did a lot of work around education. And one of the things I realised that it wasn't just working class children who have failed by the system. It wasn't just black children who have failed by the system. It was black boys in particular. And black boys were more likely to be excluded. And I always remember there was a director general of the prison service who said, on the day that you exclude a child from school, you might as well give them a date and time to turn up at prison. And I've never forgotten that. And I had only the one son and I felt guilty about being an MP and not being there for him enough.

23:39And I was determined that he wouldn't go on that trajectory from school to prison. And I agonized about whether to send him to a state school or whether to send him to a private school, because I believe in the state system, but more to the point, I knew I'd be attacked for sending him to a private school. In the end, it was his choice. But as I expected, I was reigned with abuse for sending him to a private school. Some of those people were people that genuinely believed in the state system, but some of those people were people that just wanted an excuse to attack Diane Abbott. He called in to a radio station, didn't he, to defend you?

24:30There was all of this abuse and attacks and so on. But one of the saddest things was, there was one day I was in Parliament and he was at home with his nanny. and she was upstairs for some reason and he was downstairs and he was listening to the radio and he heard a call-in show on LBC and the subject was me and everyone was ringing in to attack me for sending him to a private school and very sadly he felt the need to ring up and defend me And he was only 11 and they should never have let him on air. And I've always felt very sad and very guilty that my 11-year-old son felt the need to defend his mother.

25:27I suppose it's so difficult, isn't it? Because as humans, we are multifaceted and complex and contradictory a lot of the time. and yet as politicians there's an expectation that you will live your political values and I wonder where you land on that spectrum because the way you explain it I completely agree with everything that you've just said but how much do you feel that as a flawed person who is also a politician you should live those values. I am a flawed person, but I didn't send my son to private school because I'm a flawed person. I sent my son to private school because knowing what I knew about the way the state system dealt with black boys, I felt I couldn't do anything else.

26:19until I lived in another part of the country perhaps but hackney and black boys I couldn't do it I couldn't do it in the end your children have to come first and you still campaign for a world that exists where the state system is not a fast track to prison for black boys and I suppose that's your fundamental argument is that that's not mutually exclusive you can still campaign for that and want that world to exist and be realistic about the world that we currently live in. I remember the day that the story broke in the press. Harriet Harman called me and Harriet and I are on different wings of the Labour Party but I'd known her before I became an MP because we were both young feminists working for an organization which is now known as Liberty, but was then known as the National Council for Civil Liberties.

27:22So I've known her since then, and she rang me that morning. She'd sent her son to a selective school and were criticized for that. And she rang me that morning and said, are you all right? And she also said, you mustn't stop campaigning around education because if you don't do it, nobody will. Thank you, Diane. Your second failure is that in 2010, you stood for the Labour leadership and you failed to win that contest. Why did you choose this one? Well, it was a great failure. But I had no sense of failure because I wasn't expected to win. It was a great experience, actually. There was me and there were four special advisors, people that had worked for Labour ministers.

28:19There was Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. You were outnumbered by white men called Ed. Absolutely. Absolutely. And they all had, they had resources, they had backing and so on. And I had nothing except a few volunteers. And yet at the end, because it was an electoral college with three sections, MPs, trade unions and members. And in the membership section, I came third behind Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. So I felt quite proud of that. So it was a failure, but it was a failure that in some ways was a success because I did so much better than anybody expected. But also I learned something which the wider Labour Party was only to learn in five years time.

29:15The party at the grassroots had begun to be fed up with new Labour. Do you think you'll see a black leader of the Labour Party in your lifetime? I would hope so, just as I would hope you'll see a black female leader of the United States Democratic Party in my lifetime. Yes, let's keep everything crossed. I wanted to ask you about the racism because there was this Amnesty International report that found that you were the subject of almost half of all abusive tweets about female MPs on Twitter during the 2017 election campaign. So this is seven years on from this leadership campaign, but that you received 10 times more abuse than any other MP.

30:04Diane, how do you cope with that? It's very hard. In recent years, I don't look at the abuse that comes in online. My staff do. But even then, I had someone that came to work for me who said, after a few weeks, I never thought I would see the word n*** so often. I had another young woman that came to work for me, a black young woman, who had thought about being an MP, but changed her mind when she saw what I had to put up with. It is very difficult. And sometimes you think, why am I doing this? But in the end, you have to carry on. because if you don't carry on, you know, you're not really preparing the way for others.

31:04And it's so important that we have a politics which reflects society as a whole. Have you ever got to the point where you wanted to quit? Oh, yeah. I remember, and this wasn't because of online abuse, it could have just general abuse in the media. I can't remember what particular story it was. But I remember really deciding I can't put up with this anymore. And I called one of the men who I had come in with in 1987. There were four of us, including myself. And I said, you know what, I've had enough. I'm stepping down. And he said to me, you can't step down, Diane. You have forgotten what it took to get here.

31:49So I didn't step down and I carried on. I imagine that vile, racist online abuse from anonymous avatars is one thing. But when it comes from Frank Hester, a high profile Tory donor, and when he says unforgivable things about you naming you, that that's another thing altogether. Yes, it kind of got to me, partly because this wasn't just some random nutcase online, this was the biggest Tory donor. And partly because there was something about it being completely public, which was difficult, and I felt like I had a target on my back. And the other reason it really got to me was the attitude of the Labour Party at the time.

32:45On the Monday, I think it was Anneliese Dobbs, who was the equality's shadow minister at the time, she tweeted something about Frank Hester, which didn't talk about race and didn't talk about me. And I thought, do they really think we're going to carry on attacking Frank Hester without mentioning me? And the next morning, Annalise Dodds was on Sky. And the interviewer said to her, have you reached out to Diane? And she just squirmed and said, well, I've been in a meeting all morning. Because she hadn't. Nobody in the party leadership had reached out to me. even though the Frank Hesse story had been in The Guardian for 24 hours.