Diane Abbott has said that Keir Starmer treated as her a “non person” through failing to reach out to her after the Tories’ largest ever donor Frank Hester called for her to be shot, in comments revealed in March.
Starmer’s continued disregard for Abbott
In response, a Labour spokesperson said “Starmer… reached out to Diane at the time to offer support”. It looks like Starmer is gaslighting Abbott rather than admitting he used her as political fodder to attack the Tories, without a care for her wellbeing. Abbott also revealed that Starmer used the comments as part of a Labour membership drive, while ignoring her personally.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, not only failed to return more than £15m in Hester donations, they also accepted another £5m from him days before Rishi Sunak called the election.
Hester, a private healthcare CEO, who has made millions off public healthcare contracts, said that when he sees “Diane Abbott on the TV” he wants to “hate all black women” and thinks “she should be shot”.
The Conservatives have since ignored freedom of information requests for details of ministerial meetings with Hester. In March, the British Medical Association (BMA) voted in a motion calling for Hester to resign from the Phoenix Partnership (TPP), his healthcare company. The BMA told GPs to avoid signing deals with Hester’s company.
Now there are surely questions for Labour health secretary Wes Streeting over Hester’s role in the NHS, in light of his comments.
Speaking to BBC Newsnight, Abbott said she expected “more support” from the party because Hester made her feel unsafe. She said:
one of the reasons it made me frightened is two MPs have been killed in recent years
A white supremacist killed Labour MP Jo Cox in 2016 and an Islamist extremist killed Conservative David Amess in 2021.
The first black MP in parliament, Abbott, further said that Starmer:
never reached out to me personally and did treat me as a non-person. 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.
“Clear-out of the left”
Then, Starmer tried to have Abbott removed from standing as a Labour candidate in the election, as part of his purge of left-wing MPs.
Abbott wrote a letter to the Observer that she says handed Starmer a pretext to get rid of her. She said Jewish, Irish people, and Travellers did not experience the same type of constant racism as black people. Starmer accused her of antisemitism and then suspended her.
But Starmer is much more forgiving about accusations of antisemitism towards the Labour right.
In 2020, now Chancellor Rachel Reeves posted a celebratory thread about Nancy Astor, the first woman MP in the Commons. Astor was antisemitic. She wrote to the US ambassador in the 1930s that Adolf Hitler could be a solution to the “world problems” of Jewish people and communists. This is not just a ‘those were the times’ part of history – that would ignore the people that opposed the antisemitism that led to the Holocaust.
Abbott said:
I think that Keir Starmer wanted to finish his clear-out 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.
And 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 as a Labour candidate because I wouldn’t be in the parliamentary Labour Party, and they would parachute in someone else
Only under immense pressure did Starmer allow Abbott to stand as a Labour MP.
Starmer removed any left-wing candidate he could get away with, from inequality economist Faiza Shaheen to Lloyd Russel-Moyle of Brighton. He left their removal to the last moment before the election. So there was only time to impose his right-wing loyalists as candidates, rather than any selection vote from party members.
Abbott also said the process whereby she was told to stand down the same day as she would be returned the whip (as if that was a reasonable deal) was “designed to humiliate” her.
Featured image via Lorraine – YouTube
