Diane Julie Abbott was born on 27 September 1953 and is a British politician who has served as Member of Parliament for Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987.
73 Facts About Diane Abbott
2.
Diane Abbott served in the Shadow Cabinet of Jeremy Corbyn as Shadow Home Secretary from 2016 to 2020.
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Diane Abbott is both the first black woman elected to parliament and the longest-serving black MP.
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Diane Abbott was a member of the Labour Party Black Sections.
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Critical of Tony Blair's New Labour project that moved the party towards the centre during the 1990s, in the House of Commons Diane Abbott voted against several Blair policies, including the Iraq War and the Identity Cards Act 2006.
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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.
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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.
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Diane Abbott was born to Jamaican parents in Paddington, London, on 27 September 1953.
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Diane Abbott's father worked as a welder and her mother as a nurse.
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Diane Abbott attended Harrow County School for Girls and then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read history, achieving a lower second-class degree.
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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.
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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.
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Diane Abbott was the first black woman to become an MP.
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Diane Abbott has served on a number of parliamentary committees on social and international issues and held shadow ministerial positions in successive Shadow Cabinets.
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Diane Abbott went on to serve on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
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Diane Abbott gave birth to her son in October 1991, one year before the House of Commons introduced a creche.
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Diane Abbott is the founder of the London Schools and the Black Child initiative, which aims to raise educational achievement levels amongst black children.
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In May 2010, Diane Abbott was returned as MP for the constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington, with a doubled majority on an increased turn-out.
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On 20 May 2010, Diane Abbott announced her intention to stand in the Labour leadership contest.
20.
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.
21.
On 5 February 2013, following the Second Reading, Diane Abbott voted in favour of the Marriage Bill.
22.
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.
23.
On 23 June 2014, Diane Abbott had stated she would consider standing in the 2016 London mayoral election as Mayor of London.
24.
On 30 November 2014, Diane Abbott announced her intention to put herself forward to become Labour's candidate at the London mayoral elections in 2016.
25.
Diane Abbott was unsuccessful in her bid for Labour's 2015 London mayoral election nomination.
26.
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.
27.
On 27 June 2016, after 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.
28.
On 6 October 2016, following the resignation of Andy Burnham, Diane Abbott was appointed Shadow Home Secretary.
29.
Diane Abbott was sworn of the Privy Council on 15 February 2017.
30.
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.
31.
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.
32.
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.
33.
Diane Abbott insisted that she had read the report, but was unable to recall any of the 127 recommendations.
34.
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".
35.
On 2 October 2019, Diane Abbott became the first black MP at the dispatch box at Prime Minister's Questions.
36.
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.
37.
Diane Abbott was a supporter of Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, and defended him from bullying allegations made by David Leakey.
38.
Diane Abbott was re-elected at the snap 2019 general election.
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.
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.
44.
The Trust said that Diane Abbott had appeared on the show too often.
45.
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.
46.
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.
47.
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.
48.
Diane Abbott criticised David Cameron's government for its continued support for Saudi Arabian-led military intervention in Yemen.
49.
Diane Abbott campaigned and supported the Labour Party's official preference for the remain campaign in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.
50.
In January 2017, Diane Abbott stated that Labour could oppose the bill to trigger Article 50 if Labour's amendments were rejected.
51.
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.
52.
Diane Abbott said she did this out of party loyalty and respect for democracy In December 2017, Abbott did not support holding a second referendum, saying in 2018 that the UK would vote to leave again in a hypothetical poll.
53.
Diane Abbott supported the holding of one following the 2019 European Parliament elections.
54.
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.
55.
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.
56.
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.
57.
Diane Abbott added that he had wanted to attend a private school rather than attend a local state school in Abbott's Hackney constituency.
58.
In 2004, following a complaint made by Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell, Diane Abbott was investigated by the Committee on Standards and Privileges regarding payments she had received from the BBC.
59.
In 1996, Diane Abbott was criticised after she claimed that at her local hospital "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" were unsuitable as nurses because they had "never met a black person before".
60.
Diane Abbott later apologised for "any offence caused", claiming that she had not intended to "make generalisations about white people"; she claimed in an interview with Andrew Neil that her tweet was referring to the history of the British Empire.
61.
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.
62.
Diane Abbott replied that "[i]t was 34 years ago and I've moved on".
63.
In November 2020, Diane Abbott apologised for appearing on a livestream with Li Jingjing, a journalist who works for the Chinese state-owned CGTN, who denied human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and suggested they were a "fiction" cooked up to try and start a "racial war".
64.
The tweet was criticised by a Home Office source who accused Diane Abbott of departing from the facts and for stoking racial tensions after suggesting that the shooting was a racially motivated attack and targeted because of Johnson's activism.
65.
On 24 February 2022, following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Diane Abbott was one of 11 Labour MPs threatened with losing the party whip after they signed a statement by the Stop the War Coalition that questioned the legitimacy of NATO and accused the military alliance of "eastward expansion".
66.
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.
67.
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.
68.
Diane Abbott chose her Conservative MP voting pair, Jonathan Aitken, as her son's godfather.
69.
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 TV programme Play It Again.
70.
Diane Abbott performed Frederic Chopin's Prelude No 4 in E minor before an audience.
71.
In July 2019, Diane Abbott called 999 after being "chased around her home" by her son, James Diane Abbott-Thompson.
72.
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.
73.
In 2020, Diane Abbott was invited to participate in Strictly Come Dancing.