Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘Tony Blair walks on water.’ Decades ago this statement led a Times photographer and me to the front door of the dismal Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour party offices. It was 23 April 1997, and a fateful general election loomed. I was my newspaper’s 46-year-old political sketchwriter, and Labour’s local candidate was a 43-year-old MP called Diane Abbott. She had hit the headlines with her withering response to New Labour demands that she cease her unhelpful noises-off from stage-left and toe the line. There were Labour colleagues who could have attested without sarcasm to their leader’s amphibian powers. She was not one of them.
‘MPs are pack animals. They’ll see the fate of their colleague and run the other way’
We were destined to wait outside that office all day. Abbott never came out. Occasionally we thought we spotted her peering through an upstairs window.
So we amused ourselves by contacting her rival candidates, and were joined on that doorstep by Dickon Tolson, an engaging youth from the None of the Above party who had invested all his savings in the requisite deposit. An extra in Peak Practice, Mr Tolson was campaigning for individual freedom; and arrived on his bike. Also joining us was Lisa Lovebucket, of the Rainbow Connection Dream Ticket party, who hoped for 23 votes precisely: ‘It’s the number of the Illuminati,’ she told me. And arriving with his rosette was the obviously doomed Conservative candidate, Michael Lavender.
Mr Tolson has gone on to a successful acting career; I have been unable to track down further information about Ms Lovebucket; and there’s a Michael Lavender who became Tory leader on Enfield Borough Council and briefly hit the news by playing the Candy Crush video game during a council meeting and – accused by Labour councillors of treating them with contempt – responded magnificently (according to report) that he was glad they’d got the message. But it’s possible that was a different Michael Lavender.
Diane Abbott, however, is still here, though not holed up in her constituency office. I too am still here, though not outside it. And, as ever, I find myself full of admiration for her.
Admiration, not sympathy. Sympathy would be misplaced for a redoubtable politician who is more than capable of giving as good as she gets. Were Diane in charge of the Azerbaijani Thought Police, and Sir Keir a notable dissident, he could expect no mercy. Chief Inspector Abbott would first have made sure key figures in the regime were on side, and then gone in for the kill. Starmer appears to have failed to square senior colleagues, half-tried to go in for the kill via subordinates, then, without himself putting his head properly above the parapet but finding support collapsing, backed off. He is now treating the whole episode as if it hadn’t happened. Assuming she does stand (she says she wants to), Diane will win in her Hackney constituency and return to the Commons nursing an unconcealed grudge against a party leader who tried, and failed, to destroy her career. Well done, Keir!
Is this an emerging pattern? Run a plan half-way up the flagpole then, if nobody salutes it, run it back down? Prime Minister Starmer will find himself with tougher nuts to crack than a truculent backbencher with a handful of supporters but no real gang. What lesson will other Keir-sceptics in the party have drawn from this? Kick back hard and fast, call the leader out publicly, and get Angela Rayner on side. Labour’s deputy leader displayed the opposite qualities to her leader’s. A lesser being would have taken Abbott’s side while making clear she was only expressing a personal opinion. Not Rayner. ‘… [a]nd I am saying that as deputy leader of the Labour party,’ she added. The significance of that clarification should not be lost on us. Rayner’s power source is the party that elected her, not her leader’s patronage: she was challenging him, and wanted us to know it.
The irony is that Starmer’s initial strategy, before he lost his nerve, was the right one – ‘and I’m saying that’ as one of Abbott’s admirers. I recall the advice of a good friend and a good man, the late Tristan (Lord) Garel-Jones, whose deftness in the whips’ office helped Mrs Thatcher get her legislation through, and who later helped John Major deliver the Maastricht Treaty. He and I were discussing party discipline.
‘Single somebody out from among the troublemakers,’ said Tristan. ‘It doesn’t matter who – it can be quite random – but preferably without an organised gang of their own. Pick on something they’ve said or done as your casus belli – again, anything plausible will do – then come down on them like a ton of bricks, and very publicly. MPs are pack animals. They’ll see the fate of their colleague and run the other way. So go early, go hard, and don’t leave your victim standing.’
He then reminded me of the sad story of Admiral Byng, a fairly blameless 18th-century naval officer whose misfortune was to be in command during a sea battle lost through little fault of his own. Byng was court-martialled and executed on deck by firing squad. ‘Pour encourager les autres,’ remarked Voltaire wryly, referring to the story in Candide.
If that was Starmer’s plan, it was shrewd. The real objection to Abbott will have been that she’s on the party’s left, indifferent to office, insolent and careless what offence she gives the leadership – though not in any way a ringleader. She offered Starmer his excuse when more than a year ago she wrote that the racism black people face is in a different league from other minority groups – a remark defensible, but easy to misconstrue. The Starmerite plan was to stay quiet then shaft her, minutes – as it were – before a general election. Tristan would have approved of the strategy. However (he would have said) the worst possible outcome would be to lose your nerve.
Sir Keir intended to make an example of Abbott. Instead, Abbott has made an example of Sir Keir. This will encourage les autres.
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