Reds in the bed: Jeremy, Diane and a naked romp in a Cotswolds field
Labour leader even took his lover on a romantic road trip ... to East Germany
WHEn Jeremy Corbyn took his seat on the Labour frontbench this week, the familiar figure of Diane Abbott was by his side. In fact, Abbott – elevated to the Shadow Cabinet for the first time since she entered Parliament in 1987 – was also close to Corbyn at his coronation as Labour leader in Westminster last Saturday.
For more than 35 years, Corbyn, 66, the MP for Islington north since 1983, has been a close friend and political soulmate of Abbott, 61, the MP for the adjoining constituency of Hackney north.
They were driven together by an ideological belief that Labour had become too moderate. But they were not just united in a belief in higher taxes for the middle classes, and unilateral nuclear disarmament. They were secret lovers, even though Corbyn was married to academic Jane Chapman, who was a fellow disciple of the hard Left.
The relationship between Corbyn and Abbott went from platonic to physical in 1979, after they were thrown together at long, late-night and often bad-tempered meetings of the far Left Campaign for Labour Party Democracy pressure group.
At the time, Corbyn was about 30 and a full-time trade union official and councillor in north London, alongside his wife, who was keen to become an MP.
Having won a scholarship to Cambridge, Abbott, who was 25, had become a solicitor with the national Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), which was regarded as a stepping stone to Westminster.
Harriet Harman, who was acting Labour leader until last weekend, was legal officer at the NCCL, and Patricia Hewitt, another who became a Labour Cabinet minister, was general secretary.
Abbott, also a councillor, was often fighting the same political battles as Corbyn, which is how they became known as the ‘dreadful duo’. A former colleague from the time said: ‘Diane was one of the brightest stars in the London Labour Party. She was outspoken and articulate and destined to become one of our first black MPs.
‘Jeremy was also making a name for himself as a disciple of Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone, who was a big noise in the London Labour Party. There was an almost magnetic attraction between Diane and Jeremy.’
They became lovers at his London home, apparently after talking socialist doctrine over cups of tea and tins of cold baked beans. Teetotal Corbyn’s pet cat, named Harold Wilson after the former Labour Prime Minister, kept them company.
The lovers even took a motorbike holiday together, but they didn’t head for the Riviera or the Costas. To them, the perfect destination was a trip behind the Berlin Wall to East Germany, which then was run by Soviet hardliner Erich Honecker. ‘ Their politics were probably not dissimilar,’ says one veteran Labour MP tartly.
The inconvenient fact that Corbyn – now dubbed the Sexpot Trot – was actually still married, though living separately from his wife, seems not to have stopped them.
He had married Miss Chapman, who is now professor of communications at Lincoln University, in 1974, but the union ended in divorce in 1979 after his fling with Abbott. Last night, Prof Chapman spoke for the first time about Abbott’s ‘ brief fling’ with her former husband.
ASKED if the extra-marital sex with Abbott triggered the divorce, she told me: ‘no. She’s not the reason why. The reasons are already out there.’ Her husband, she has said in the past, was ‘ devoted 100 per cent to politics and work, so there wasn’t much time for me’.
Prof Chapman, who is still a Labour member – and who told me she voted for her former husband in the leadership election – added: ‘I left him, but we were not legally separated.’ While Prof Chapman had hoped there might be a reconciliation, she admits: ‘ Then she [Abbott] turned up. I knew about it. We divorced. I don’t want to say anything else about her.’ Hardly a sisterly endorsement.
The story of Corbyn’s tryst has also shed intriguing new light on an interview Abbott gave to She magazine in 1985, when she was running to be Labour’s parliamentary candidate in Brent East.
She described her ‘finest half- hour’ as being when she romped with a naked man in a Cotswold field. She described him as a ‘longtime friend and very close’ ally. Though she was too coy to reveal this al fresco lothario’s identity, she admitted they went on a romantic trip across ‘Soviet East Germany on a motorbike’.
Either she made that trip with more than one l over, or the mystery chap was none other than the new Labour leader.
The revelation yesterday that Corbyn and Abbott were more than just friends was hardly on the scale of the shockwaves caused in 2002 when Edwina Currie admitted she and John Major had been lovers. But it has still been the talk of Westminster, not least because of the delicious fact that it has emerged within days of Corbyn promoting Abbott to his Shadow Cabinet.
The confirmation of the relation- ship came days after Abbott clashed with fellow Labour MP Jess Phillips at a packed and tense meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
Abbott accused Phillips of asking a ‘sanctimonious’ question about the fact the top three positions in the Shadow Cabinet – chancellor, home secretary and foreign secretary – were all given to men.
Abbott, in f ull view of her colleagues, rebuked her fellow MP, saying: ‘You’re not the only feminist in the Labour Party.’
Phillips, who became MP for Birmingham Yardley in May and has already earned a reputation for being outspoken, told the Huffington Post: ‘I roundly told her to f*** off. People said to me they had always wanted to say that to her, and I don’t know why they don’t, as the opportunity presents itself every other minute.’ Corbyn failed to intervene, staying silent during the row. Some Labour MPs are now asking whether he will be able to exercise real leadership when it comes to disputes involving his old flame. ‘One word from Jeremy could have ended that altercation,’ said one MP who was at the meeting.
ONE area where Corbyn and Abbott do not see eye to eye is on education. Having spent years condemning private schools, Abbott was embarrassed when it emerged she had t aken her 11-year-old son James out of the state school system in 2003, and sent him to the £10,000-a-year City of London School for Boys. She separated from the boy’s father after a couple of years.
Corbyn will have been appalled
by her decision. His second marriage, in 1987, was to fiery Chilean campaigner Claudia Bracchitta, an interior designer whose striking good looks and innate style are at odds with a husband whose dress sense is as outdated as his politics.
They divorced in 1999 after he objected to her sending their son to a grammar school nine miles from their home, rather than to the local comprehensive.
Bracchitta said at the time: ‘The difficulties of making decisions under these circumstances have played an important role in bringing about a regrettable marital break-up.’
But there may have been more to the break-up of that second marriage. Corbyn’s older brother, Piers, once a member of the Communist Party, when asked if his brother was unfaithful to his second wife, said: Something like that must have been going on when they finally split up, but I don’t know who was bad first.’ Of course, we will never know whether his suspicions were correct.
The Labour l eader i s now married to wife No 3 – Laura Alvarez, 46, who is 20 years his junior. A committed political activist, they married two years ago in her native Mexico, from where she imports Fairtrade coffee.
While Corbyn, at 66, is the oldest leader of the Labour Party for 32 years, his appeal to the opposite sex seems undimmed. During the leadership contest, he was dubbed a sex symbol on the parenting website Mumsnet, with mothers expressing their admiration for his ‘world-weary sea-dog look’ and his ‘passion’ for socialism.
Which i s exactly, i t seems, what f i rst attracted a young Diane Abbott.