A Woman Like Me

Diane Abbott

(Viking, 2024)

Review by Suzanne Harrington

‘If Britain, for all its flaws, could produce a woman like me, there is hope for us yet,’ concludes Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney & Stoke Newington since 1987, the first black woman elected to Parliament, and the longest serving black MP in the House of Commons. Now ‘Mother of the House’, her self-driven trajectory has been extraordinary.  

It’s probably better that Abbott finished her memoir with that sentence, because by the time you’ve read the life story of this indefatigable, indomitable woman, you might be inclined to agree with her, whereas if she’d started with it, your eyebrow may have raised. She’s referring to herself in the third person by the second paragraph of the first page, but don’t let that put you off either – her story is a masterclass in brains, guts, grit, tenacity and an unwavering moral compass. 

‘Black Diane’, as she was called by the right wing press, was decades ahead of her time and derided as part of the ‘loony left’ in the Eighties for her ‘support of gay rights, race equality, feminism … Palestine … and a united Ireland’ – not just by the opposition, but by her own party; Labour leaders from Neil Kinnock to Keir Starmer have tried their best to sideline her for her ‘extremist’ views.   

She began her parliamentary career as the only black woman among 650 elected MPs, and has received, according to Amnesty International research, ‘ten times more [online hate] than any other female MP.’  She recalls being told in 1987 by US political activist Angela Davis, ‘Be prepared to go the distance.’ And she has, campaigning for better access to education for black children, speaking out against the Iraq war, advocating for refugees. She’s made a career of sticking up for those overlooked or marginalised by the political mainstream.

Abbott was born in London in 1953 to Windrush generation, Jamaican parents, a nurse and a factory worker;  the family moved to all-white Harrow in 1958 to avoid inner city ‘n—- hunts’. At state school, she was an ‘A’ student, and went on to read history at Cambridge; there, unprepared for the attendant ‘niceties’, a friend had to show her how to eat artichoke.  

After university, Abbott worked as a civil servant in the Home Office, ‘a dreary and stultifying place’ prompting her to join the Labour Party ‘as a minor act of rebellion.’ She met Ken Livingston, Tony Benn, John McDonell, Bernie Grant and Jeremy Corbyn, with whom she had a relationship. They went camping in France on Jeremy’s ‘socialist motorbike’; on another occasion he took her on a date to see Karl Marx’s grave. ‘I began to realise ours was not a match made in heaven,’ she writes. They parted amicably: ‘Jeremy doesn’t do acrimony.’

Abbott’s son James, from a brief marriage, was born in Hackney in 1992; his godfather is her Tory colleague Jonathan Aitken.’There was no such thing as maternity leave for MPs,’ she writes. She single parented him: ‘I spent half the time thinking I was a terrible mother, and the other half thinking I was a terrible MP.’

She’s neither. Still an active MP aged 71, there are very few women like her.   She’s a warrior. 

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/445047/a-woman-like-me-by-abbott-diane/9780241536414

Suzanne Harrington

Suzanne Harrington is an Irish author and journalist.