Britain’s longest-serving black MP talks about fighting prejudice inside and outside the Labour party, the failure of Corbynism – and the ‘poison’ of Brexit
Diane Abbott was elected MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in 1987. We are sitting outside a cafe in her constituency, reminiscing about her fondest memory in politics, which arrived 10 years later: the 1997 general election and the sheer exhilaration of getting the tube, victorious, to Labour’s landslide celebration party in the Royal Festival Hall, strangers shouting congratulations.
“What happened afterwards was another story,” she notes with comic grimness. She never even tried to be New Labour and disagreed with Tony Blair on basically every tenet, from privatisation through civil liberties to foreign policy.
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