SHE SMASHED BARRIERS BUT, OH, THE HYPOCRISY

The first black female MP, Diane Abbott enjoyed the privileges of grammar school and Cambridge. So why does she disdain Britain?

POLITICS is a ruthless business and Diane Abbott’s unprecedented replacement as Shadow Home Secretary, less than 24 hours before the General Election, was as unsentimental as it was probably overdue.

That it was overseen by Jeremy Corbyn, her former lover on whose motorcycle pillion she once toured East Germany, gave it a soap opera-style twist. Over past months, Ms Abbott’s absences from key political events, and a number of ‘ car crash’ media appearances, have drawn unwelcome attention.

There were whispers at Westminster that Corbyn’s once ideologically sound talisman, whose status as Britain’s first female black MP cemented her support among the core hard-Left, had become a lethal ‘liability’.

Certainly, she has not looked well and in private she’s no longer been her ebullient self.

Yesterday, the cause of her decline was articulated by one senior colleague as a ‘long-term medical illness’. As yet, the condition is unspecified.

It was Monday night’s toe- curling interview with Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News that proved to be a watershed. In the wake of the terrorist atrocities in Manchester and at London Bridge, the woman who would have been in charge of Britain’s security following a Labour election victory today was quizzed about a key counter-terrorism review on how to protect the capital from an attack.

Confused

Ms Abbott, 63, was confused and out of her depth; clinging to the words ‘preparedness’ and ‘resilience’ over and over — neither qualities which she apparently possessed.

The following morning she pulled — or was pulled — out of a debate with her Tory counterpart, Amber Rudd, on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, citing ‘illness’. No doubt it was a move that saved both Ms Abbott and the Labour Party from further damage.

But her credibility was again questioned after she was photographed at Oxford Circus Tube station, close to the BBC’s Broadcasting House, which suggested she had been en route to the studios.

Leaked emails in which she expressed concern about ‘telling untruths about my health’ added to the confusion.

The criticism Ms Abbott has attracted over the past few days has not been rooted in ‘sexism and racism’ as singer Lily Allen and others on Twitter tried to suggest.

Few who saw her Sky News appearance could not help but conclude something seemed to be seriously amiss. One hopes Mr Corbyn’s decision is rooted in concern for the wellbeing of a close friend rather than a cynical move to shore up the Labour vote after it became clear that ‘ Diane Abbott’ had become an issue on the doorstep.

Friends told the BBC last night that she was not consulted over her removal. Ms Abbott bravely insists she will be back. The Labour Party says her replacement is only a ‘temporary’ measure. We will see.

Some already view it as the beginning of the end of what has been one of the more remarkable and controversial careers in modern British politics. While she has often railed against institutionalised prejudice (once describing Britain as a country that ‘invented racism’), she was able to overcome a difficult childhood to enjoy an education afforded to the privileged few.

The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she was brought up in suburban West London and won a place at the selective Harrow County School for Girls. The only black girl in her class, she worried about her weight, she recalls. But she shone academically, despite her parents’ acrimonious divorce which saw her mother move to Yorkshire.

‘I had to do all the cooking and cleaning while I studied for my exams — my father hadn’t heard of modern feminism,’ she said. ‘It was all very stressful, very difficult.’

In the sixth-form she took part in amateur dramatics with counterparts from Harrow County School for Boys. Her circle of friends included the future barrister and broadcaster Clive Anderson, Nigel Sheinwald, who would become Britain’s ambassador to Washington — and Michael Portillo, a future Tory Cabinet minister with whom she starred in Romeo And Juliet ‘though not in the title roles’.

Ms Abbott secured a place to read history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was taught by the TV historian, Simon Schama. Once again she felt alone ‘among these privileged white people,’ adding: ‘I thought at first I’d made a horrible mistake.’ In fact, she said, it proved ‘the making of me’. On graduation, she joined the Civil Service as an administrative trainee at the Home Office; a post she held for three years and one, she has said, that gave her the inside knowledge necessary to run the whole department.

She left to become a race relations officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties, before working in breakfast TV and then entering political public relations.

She was a press officer for Ken Livingstone when he ran the hard-Left Greater London Council, and held a similar position at Lambeth Borough Council, before serving on Westminster City Council.

Her historic breakthrough came in 1987. Having failed to beat her old boss Livingstone to become the prospective candidate for Brent East, she was elected to the safe Labour seat of Hackney North and Stoke Newington, which she still represents.

In a decade that saw the Labour Party racked by internal strife and Marxist entryism, Ms Abbott occupied a place on the far-Left fringes.

Much of what she said and wrote then has come back to haunt her as she has repositioned in recent times. If she was not the terrorist’s friend, she certainly proved to be their useful idiot.

In 1984, she told an Irish republican-supporting journal: ‘I couldn’t identify myself as British.’ Of the armed struggle in Ulster, she declared: ‘Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us.’

Abolition

Quizzed on this last month, she made matters worse by replying facetiously: ‘It was 34 years ago, I had a rather splendid Afro at the time. I don’t have the same hairstyle, I don’t have the same views.’

In 1989, Ms Abbott signed a parliamentary motion calling for ‘the abolition of conspiratorial groups like MI5 and Special Branch’. She has since explained that MI5 has been ‘reformed’ so she could now support it.

A decade later, the woman who would be Home Secretary, voted against the proscription of a number of terrorist groups including Al- Qaeda, later excusing herself by saying: ‘ I deemed them to be dissidents rather than terrorist organisations’.

But her speech against the 2008 Counter-Terrorism Act won her the Spectator’s

Parliamentary Speech Of The Year award.

Ms Abbott enjoys the limelight, but she had increasingly become a moth to its flame. No more so on than in her regular guest appearances on Andrew Neil’s BBC1 politics show This Week, alongside her former teenage thespian sidekick, Michael Portillo.

On one occasion she caused mirthful incredulity by claiming Chairman Mao did ‘on balance, more good than harm’. For the record, the Chinese Communist leader’s Great Leap Forward is reckoned to have been responsible for 45 million deaths.

She also struggled to justify a 2012 tweet saying: ‘White people love playing “divide and rule. We should not play their game”.

No, it was not racist, she insisted to Neil. She was simply ‘referring to the history of the British Empire’. But Neil — like so many others — tackled her on her decision to send her son, from her brief marriage to an African architect, to the private City of London School. Fees are £17,000 a year.

Ms Abbott had previously lambasted Tony Blair and Harriet Harman for sending their children to selective state schools. She admitted that her hypocrisy was ‘indefensible’, but explained that ‘West Indian mums would go to the wall for their children’ and she’d done it because ‘in Hackney only 9 per cent of black boys get decent GCSEs’.

For many, this ‘do as I say not as I do’ approach left a stain on her socialist credibility.

Another quirk was her longstanding relationship with the patrician former Tory Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken. They met in the mid-Eighties when both were working at TV-am.

When she joined Aitken in the Commons, their friendship flourished. He drove her to her dying mother’s bedside and then arranged the funeral. He was also godfather to her son.

Both Aitken and Abbott have denied gossip that their relationship went beyond professional friendship. Last night, Aitken said: ‘I wish Diane well. She is a good, brave member of Parliament and front-bencher.’

There is another significant male politician in her life, of course. Ms Abbott was one of only 36 Labour MPs to support Mr Corbyn’s leadership nomina- tion in 2015. After his victory, she returned to the Shadow Front Bench, having briefly served there under Ed Miliband.

It then emerged that Ms Abbott and Mr Corbyn were once more than just ideologically compatible. They enjoyed a sexual relationship in the late Seventies after Mr Corbyn split from his first wife. Friends described being invited to his bedsit during the 1979 general election only to discover Ms Abbott there wearing only a duvet.

One recalled: ‘It was the lateSeventies, it was still a point of interest, a white man with a black woman, so he was slightly showing off: “I’ve got a new girlfriend and she’s black.”’

In a 1985 interview, Abbott said her ‘finest ever half-hour’ was spent romping with a naked man in a field in the Cotswolds, which, it was pointed out, is en route to the Wiltshire village where Mr Corbyn’s parents lived.

Ms Abbott was clearly one MP Mr Corbyn could trust. But her erratic, low octane performance as Shadow Home Secretary became a cause for concern.

In February, she attracted scorn from colleagues when she ducked out of the vote to trigger Article 50 to begin Brexit, by claiming a migraine. She’d claimed people who voted for Brexit wanted ‘less foreign-looking people on their streets’.

The anger was compounded by the fact she’d been photographed drinking in a Westminster pub the night before.

The morning after, she was spotted in a park in East London in an over-sized coat and hat pulled low, looking ‘bewildered and as if she was in disguise’, according to an observer.

Then, last month, she ‘misspoke’, making a hash of a round of interviews — most memorably when quizzed by Nick Ferrari on LBC radio — on the cost of the 10,000 extra policemen she said Labour would provide.

And then the sorry events of this week. For Jeremy Corbyn’s faithful pillion passenger, it may be the end of the political road.

Her erratic performance was a concern