Jeremy Corbyn Duvet days with Diane Abbott
Corbyn found little time for fun as a young party member, but there was romance and a liaison that began a long-standing alliance
AS A Labour activist and union official in London in the 1970s, Corbyn adopted the universal look of the revolutionary socialist, a peaked cap and grubby green jacket covered in grease from his motorbike, which he got from an Army surplus store close to one of his brothers’ squats near Euston Station.
When a member of his trade union, a Savile Row tailor, offered to make Corbyn a bespoke suit, he gracefully declined, saying: “I’m not a great one for expensive clothes.” Speaking to a local historian years later, he added: “I said that would be corrupt, and bribing a trade union official.”
As the anecdote suggests, Corbyn’s was an austere existence; he did not drink, smoke, take drugs, crave material possessions or have cultural interests; to him, politics was so allconsuming it left little room for other interests, hobbies, or even vices.
Keith Veness, a union colleague, recalls that when he lent Corbyn books, he returned them unread.
Hornsey Labour Party had attractions for Corbyn other than nights out in the pub. During the course of 1973, he began chatting to fellow member Jane Chapman, at the time a postgraduate student, at party meetings.
While campaigning together for Harold Wilson during the 1974 general election, they fell in love, enjoying what she has described as a “whirlwind romance”. “He was friendly and lively and seemed bright and committed,” Chapman later said. “And he wasn’t bad-looking in those days. He was quite charming.”
Three months later they were married; like Corbyn, Chapman was 25 years old. “We were both very poor,” she has said. “He was a union organiser and I was a postgraduate student on a scholarship grant so we didn’t have much money. It wasn’t exactly lunch at the Ritz. It was mainly meetings and then seeing me afterwards.
“But he’s never drunk or smoked so we didn’t get drunk together. There was a slightly puritanical ethic, which I wasn’t used to.”
Politics, the nuts-and-bolts version that involved helping people and promoting the causes you believed in, was everything.
In 1975, Corbyn was recruited to join the National Union of Public Employees as an organiser.
His work involved representing cleaners and dinner ladies employed by the now-defunct Inner London Education Authority. It left him plenty of freedom to continue his political work in Hornsey.
What there was little time for, however, was fun, and his wife began to feel restless. Lord Harris, then a friend of the couple, says that while she might have been keen to invite people over for dinner and conversation Corbyn would not have seen the point.
Conversation unrelated to politics was meaningless and as for the food, well, as Chapman has said, he could always eat cold baked beans out of a tin when he was hungry.
Tariq Ali, another contemporary, cannot remember attending many social events with Corbyn either. Jane and Jeremy did manage a few camping holidays, touring Europe on Corbyn’s 250cc Czech CZ motorbike, but on their return it was back to politics.
Although she was ambitious, keen to become an MP, having been selected to fight the parliamentary seat of Deal in Kent at the next election, Chapman felt she was too young to forgo all other interests.
“He’s a genuinely nice guy,” she has said. “The problem is, his politics are to the exclusion of other kinds of human activities, like spending longer going out for a meal, or going out to the cinema, buying clothes, watching
EastEnders. It’s the work–life balance.” Although she herself was not yet ready for children, Chapman knew she wanted them one day, and became increasingly concerned that Corbyn might never agree to it. “Jeremy was
‘He’s totally committed to politics, so your emotional life as part of a relationship takes a back seat’
100 per cent dedicated to his work,” she says.
“Of course, we both were very active together [but] I … wanted more from life, some time for personal things. We were still very young and he didn’t want children then.
“I got burnt out by politics, I was exhausted by it all and he wasn’t,” Chapman went on. “I wanted to do other things – go to the cinema, go clubbing. He has remained very focused politically but, although I was committed, I just didn’t have it to the same extent.”
Friends of the couple remember Chapman’s complaints about Corbyn’s failure to do any housework. “She probably wanted more of a social life but he genuinely was 24-hours-a-day driven,” Lord Harris says.
“He’s totally committed to politics, so your emotional life as part of a relationship takes a back seat,” Chapman added. “He just didn’t attach much importance to the domestic side or to anything other than interest in politics.”
There were no rows but the couple drifted apart, and by 1979 the relationship was over. “In all honesty, they didn’t split up, it just unravelled,” Veness says. “He never came home very much and Jane gave up on him in the end.”
Corbyn bought out Chapman’s share of their flat, and by the end of the year they were divorced. Corbyn was not single for long. Chapman has since said that she still half held out the hope that they might reconcile, but within a few months of the separation, her husband had met the woman with whom he would have one of the most long-standing relationships of his life: Diane Abbott.
While his love affair with Abbott would barely last the year, from the embers of their romance they would go on to form a deep friendship and alliance that sustains both and continues to this day.
Abbott, who was then 26, was working as a race relations officer for the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) when they met.
The child of Jamaican immigrants – Corbyn would have enjoyed discussing with her his “gap year” adventures on the island a decade earlier – Diane’s mother was a nurse and her father a welder, and she grew up in north London.
Like Corbyn, Abbott was the product of a grammar school education; unlike him, she took full advantages of the opportunities it provided, going on to Cambridge University, where contemporaries remember her as cutting quite a dash.
Abbott has said that having initially found the experience of going to university daunting, it became the making of her, giving her a confidence she would require in her later careers. “In every profession I’ve worked in, from TV journalist to MP, I’ve never been afraid to be the only woman or ethnic minority,” she has said. “I’ve always worked in male-dominated careers and politics is no different.”
After university, Abbott entered the civil service, where she worked at the Home Office, going on to join the NCCL shortly before meeting Corbyn. There, she got to know future Labour luminaries, including Patricia Hewitt, the then general secretary; its legal officer Harriet Harman; and Harman’s husband Jack Dromey.
Some of Corbyn’s friends in the local Hornsey Labour Party received a somewhat rude introduction to his new lover. In September 1979, undeterred by Labour’s defeat nationally a few months earlier, Corbyn summoned a small group of activists together early one morning to hit the campaign trail.
A party member who was present that day says: “One Sunday autumn morning, he had broken up with Jane, and we were out leafleting.
“And for some reason he called four or five of us and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go back to my flat and pick up some leaflets.’
“It seemed a bit odd – ‘Why the hell didn’t you bring them with you, Jeremy?’ So we all bowl along to his bedsit, follow Jeremy into the room; there on the mattress on the floor in the one room is Diane with the duvet up to her neck, saying: ‘What the f---’s going on?’
“We were quite shaken. You know what it’s like when people you know both sides of break up – you have no inkling they’re going to break up, then suddenly they break up. So there was a bit of people’s surprise at that.
“It was [the] late 1970s, 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’.”