1. Diane Julie Abbott was born on 27 September 1953 and is a British Labour Party politician who has been serving as Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987.
86 Facts About Diane Abbott
1. 2.
Diane Abbott served in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016 to 2020 and is an advisor to the Privy Council.
3.
Diane Abbott was the first black woman elected to parliament and is the longest-serving black MP, as well as the longest continually serving female MP since 2024, making her the Mother of the House.
4.
Diane Abbott was a member of the Labour Party Black Sections.
5.
Critical of Tony Blair's New Labour project that moved the party towards the centre during the mid- to late 1990s, Diane Abbott voted against several Blair policies, including the Iraq War and the Identity Cards Act 2006.
6.
Diane Abbott stood for election as Leader of the Labour Party on a left-wing platform in the 2010 leadership election, finishing in last place in a contest that was won by Ed Miliband, who appointed her Shadow Minister for Health on the Official Opposition frontbench.
7.
Diane Abbott unsuccessfully attempted to be chosen as the Labour candidate for the 2016 London mayoral election, and backed the unsuccessful Britain Stronger in Europe campaign to retain UK membership of the European Union.
8.
Diane Abbott said she had been barred from standing as a Labour Party candidate at the 2024 general election, but Starmer later said she would be "free" to stand as a Labour candidate.
9.
At the general election held on 4 July 2024, Diane Abbott retained her seat as Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington and became Mother of the House as the longest continuously serving female MP.
10.
Diane Abbott was born on 27 September 1953 in Paddington to Jamaican parents.
11.
Diane Abbott's father was a welder and her mother a nurse.
12.
Diane Abbott attended Harrow County School for Girls and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied history, achieving a lower second-class degree.
13.
Diane Abbott was a researcher and reporter at Thames Television from 1980 to 1983, and then a researcher at the breakfast television company TV-am from 1983 to 1985.
14.
Diane Abbott was a press officer at the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone from 1985 to 1986, and Head of Press and Public Relations at Lambeth Council from 1986 to 1987.
15.
Many secret police reports on Diane Abbott were uncovered by the inquiry.
16.
Diane Abbott was the first black woman to become an MP.
17.
Diane Abbott has served on a number of parliamentary committees on social and international issues and held shadow ministerial positions in successive Shadow Cabinets.
18.
Diane Abbott went on to serve on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
19.
Diane Abbott gave birth to her son in October 1991, one year before the House of Commons introduced a creche.
20.
Diane Abbott is the founder of the London Schools and the Black Child initiative, which aims to raise educational achievement levels amongst black children.
21.
On 20 May 2010, Diane Abbott announced her intention to stand in the Labour leadership contest.
22.
Diane Abbott secured the necessary 33 nominations, assisted by the withdrawal of John McDonnell and support from David Miliband and Jack Straw, among others.
23.
Diane Abbott resigned from a cross-party group on abortion counselling, saying it was no more than a front to push forward an anti-abortion agenda without debate in parliament.
24.
On 5 February 2013, following the Second Reading, Diane Abbott voted in favour of the Marriage Bill.
25.
On 8 October 2013, Diane Abbott was sacked as Shadow Public Health Minister in a reshuffle by Labour leader Ed Miliband, and replaced by Luciana Berger.
26.
On 23 June 2014, Diane Abbott had stated she would consider standing in the 2016 London mayoral election; on 30 November 2014, Diane Abbott announced her intention to put herself forward to become Labour's candidate in the election, but was unsuccessful in the 2015 nomination process.
27.
Diane Abbott was one of 16 signatories of an open letter to Ed Miliband in January 2015 calling on the party to commit to oppose further austerity, take rail franchises back into public ownership and strengthen collective bargaining arrangements.
28.
On 27 June 2016, following the resignations of many of Labour's ministerial team in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, Diane Abbott was promoted to the position of Shadow Health Secretary.
29.
On 6 October 2016, following the resignation of Andy Burnham, Diane Abbott was appointed Shadow Home Secretary.
30.
Diane Abbott was sworn of the Privy Council on 15 February 2017.
31.
However, her figure was corrected by the interviewer who stated that Labour had in fact lost 125 seats, at which point Diane Abbott said that the last figures she had seen were a net loss of around 100.
32.
Diane Abbott defended a vote opposing the proscription of a list of groups, including al-Qaida, on the basis that some of the others had the status of dissidents in their country of origin and Abbott would have voted to ban al-Qaida in isolation.
33.
On 5 June 2017, during a Sky News interview, Diane Abbott was unable to answer questions about the Harris report on how to protect London from terror attacks.
34.
Diane Abbott insisted that she had read the report, but was unable to recall any of the 127 recommendations.
35.
Barry Gardiner said in a radio interview on LBC that Diane Abbott had been diagnosed with having a "long-term" medical condition, and was "coming to terms with that".
36.
On 2 October 2019, Diane Abbott became the first black MP at the dispatch box at Prime Minister's Questions.
37.
Diane Abbott served as a temporary stand-in for the Leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, while First Secretary of State Dominic Raab stood in for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
38.
Diane Abbott was a supporter of Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, and defended him from bullying allegations made by David Leakey.
39.
On 23 February 2020, Diane Abbott said she would be standing down as Shadow Home Secretary and leaving the frontbench upon the election of a new Labour leader.
40.
Diane Abbott described the local elections as disappointing for Labour.
41.
Diane Abbott criticised the shadow cabinet reshuffle later carried out by Keir Starmer.
42.
Diane Abbott told Sophy Ridge on Sky News that his demotion of Angela Rayner was "baffling".
43.
On 24 February 2022, Diane Abbott was one of eleven Labour MPs who signed a statement by the Stop the War Coalition criticising the UK government for "sabre-rattling" over Russia's invasion of Ukraine and for saying Ukraine has a right to join NATO if it wishes.
44.
In September 2023, Diane Abbott, still suspended, said that she had realised that "As a Black woman, I will not get a fair hearing from this Labour leadership".
45.
Diane Abbott was directed to complete an online e-learning module, which she did in February 2024.
46.
On 11 March 2024, The Guardian alleged that businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester had said in 2019 that Diane Abbott made him "want to hate all black women" and that "she should be shot".
47.
Diane Abbott described Hester's remarks as "frightening" and reported Hester to the Metropolitan Police's parliamentary liaison and investigations team.
48.
On 13 March 2024, Diane Abbott criticised the Speaker of the House of Commons after he failed to call on her to speak during Prime Minister's Questions, which was dominated by the "race row" surrounding her.
49.
Deputy Leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner said she hoped for Diane Abbott to have the whip restored.
50.
On 2 June 2024, Diane Abbott tweeted that she was now the Labour candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington at the general election.
51.
Until her appointment as a shadow minister in October 2010, Diane Abbott appeared alongside media personality and former Conservative politician Michael Portillo on the BBC's weekly politics digest This Week.
52.
The Trust said that Diane Abbott had appeared on the show too often.
53.
Diane Abbott is a frequent public speaker, newspaper contributor and TV performer, appearing on programmes including Have I Got News for You, Celebrity Come Dine with Me and Cash in the Celebrity Attic.
54.
Diane Abbott was shortlisted for the Grassroot Diplomat Initiative Award in 2015 for her work on London Schools and the Black Child, and remains in the directory of the Grassroot Diplomat Who's Who publication.
55.
Diane Abbott has a record of differing from some party policies, voting against the Iraq War, opposing ID cards and campaigning against the renewal of Britain's Trident nuclear weapons.
56.
Diane Abbott criticised David Cameron's government for its continued support for Saudi Arabian-led military intervention in Yemen.
57.
Diane Abbott campaigned and supported the Labour Party's official preference for the remain campaign in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.
58.
In January 2017, Diane Abbott stated that Labour could oppose the bill to trigger Article 50 if Labour's amendments were rejected.
59.
Diane Abbott abstained from voting on the second reading of the Brexit Bill, after becoming ill hours before the vote, and later voted in favour at the third and final reading.
60.
Diane Abbott said she did this out of party loyalty and respect for democracy.
61.
In December 2017, Diane Abbott did not support holding a second referendum, saying in 2018 that the UK would vote to leave again in a hypothetical poll.
62.
Diane Abbott supported the holding of one following the 2019 European Parliament elections.
63.
Diane Abbott wrote to Sajid Javid demanding that he publish the figures for people caught up in the Windrush scandal, and tell how many Commonwealth citizens lost their jobs, became homeless and were prevented from using public services.
64.
Diane Abbott wrote that "warm words are not enough", and maintained that transparency was needed to give the Windrush generation confidence ministers have come to grips with what is.
65.
Diane Abbott led his country from feudalism, he helped to defeat the Japanese and he left his country on the verge of the great economic success they are having now.
66.
In November 2024, Diane Abbott said she would not support Terminally Ill Adults Bill on assisted dying for terminally ill people.
67.
Diane Abbott criticised the amount of time available for scrutiny of the bill, brought by Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater.
68.
Diane Abbott co-wrote a piece in The Guardian with Father of the House Conservative MP Edward Leigh opposing the assisted suicide bill.
69.
Diane Abbott's son contacted a radio phone-in to say that his mother was following his own wishes: "She's not a hypocrite, she just put what I wanted first instead of what people thought," he told LBC.
70.
Diane Abbott added that he had wanted to attend a private school rather than attend a local state school in Abbott's Hackney constituency.
71.
Diane Abbott later apologised for "any offence caused", stating that she had not intended to "make generalisations about white people"; she said in an interview with Andrew Neil that her tweet was referring to the history of the British Empire.
72.
On 15 March 2024, Diane Abbott strongly denied unattributed briefings in The Independent newspaper that stated the Labour whip would have been restored if she had agreed to attend an antisemitism course.
73.
Diane Abbott called the journalism "shoddy" and the information "false".
74.
In May 2017, The Sunday Times reported that Diane Abbott backed the IRA in a 1984 interview with Labour and Ireland, a pro-republican journal.
75.
The tweet was criticised by a Home Office source who accused Diane Abbott of departing from the facts and stoking racial tensions by suggesting that the shooting was racially motivated and that Johnson was targeted because of her activism.
76.
Diane Abbott denies the claim that the tweet inflamed racial divides.
77.
An Amnesty International report found that Diane Abbott was the subject of almost half of all abusive tweets about female MPs on Twitter during the 2017 election campaign, receiving ten times more abuse than any other MP.
78.
Diane Abbott had a brief relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, who later became the Labour leader, when he was a councillor in north London in the late 1970s.
79.
Diane Abbott chose her Conservative MP voting pair, Jonathan Aitken, as her son's godfather.
80.
In 2007, Diane Abbott began learning the piano under the tutelage of Paul Roberts, Professor of Piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, for the BBC documentary television programme Play It Again.
81.
Diane Abbott performed Frederic Chopin's Prelude No 4 in E minor before an audience.
82.
In July 2019, Diane Abbott called 999 after being "chased around her home" by her son, James Diane Abbott-Thompson.
83.
In September 2020, an authorised biography of Diane Abbott was released, Diane Abbott: The Authorised Biography, by Robin Bunce and Samara Linton, published by Biteback.
84.
In 2020, Diane Abbott was invited to participate in the television dance contest show Strictly Come Dancing.
85.
Diane Abbott said that, instead, she will continue to do what she has done all of her life, speaking up on human rights, civil liberties, women's rights, and representing the people of Hackney.
86.
On 12 March 2024, after allegations that she had been targeted by racist remarks from a Conservative Party donor, Diane Abbott issued a statement saying that "as a single woman" she felt "vulnerable" in her constituency.