Diane Abbott has accused the Conservatives of aiming to “play the race card” in the general election, saying the abuse she faced from Tory donor Frank Hester epitomised this approach. In a comment piece for the Guardian, the veteran MP said Hester’s remarks left her “upset but not surprised”, given the amount of racist abuse she receives. Hester said in a 2019 meeting that he did not hate all black women but seeing Abbott on TV meant “you just want to hate all black women because she’s there”. He also said she “should be shot”. Abbott, the UK’s longest-serving black MP, who sits as an independent after losing the Labour whip last year, said she was also owed an apology from Labour over abusive comments about her revealed in internal party messages. Abbott criticised the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for not calling her during prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, after Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer discussed Hester’s comments.
In reference to Hester’s comments, she said she was “hardened to racist abuse”. She wrote: “I receive hundreds of abusive emails, phone calls and letters monthly, and the numbers shoot up whenever I am in the media. “Much of this targets my appearance, questions my intelligence and features classic racist lines such as: ‘Go back to where you come from’,” Abbott said. She contined: “But as the election draws nearer, and Labour stays 20 points ahead in the polls, the Tories are desperate. Their political trump card has always been low taxes and the sound management of the economy. “But Liz Truss blew out of water any claim the Tories had to superior economic competence, and taxation is now at its highest sustained level on record. So the only card the Tories have left to play is the race card, and they are going to play it ruthlessly.” This was manifested in policies like the Rwanda deportation scheme for asylum seekers, she said, and Conservative anxieties about extremism, which Abbott says is partly about leftwingers, “but it is also a code word for Muslims”. The Metropolitan police had been fair in their policy towards pro-Palestine marches in London, Abbott wrote, adding: “But the Tories’ underlying Islamophobic narrative demands that they continue to complain about the forces of law and order. It’s an unusual position for Conservative politicians.” Turning to Labour, Abbott said she had not received an apology from the party after a report published in 2022 by Martin Forde QC found she had been the target for abuse in private WhatsApp messages among party staffers hostile to Jeremy Corbyn, which showed “overt and underlying racism and sexism”. “They did not actually call for me to be shot but the tenor was not dissimilar to what Hester said,” Abbott wrote. “However, to this day none of the individuals concerned have apologised to me, and the Labour party has not apologised to me personally.” Abbott lost the Labour whip in April last year over a letter published in the Observer in which she appeared to play down the extent of racism against Jewish and Irish people, and Travellers. She wrote: “It will be both sad and strange if Starmer throws Britain’s first black woman MP out of the PLP [parliamentary Labour party] because of an eight-line letter, for which I immediately apologised. But the most important thing is that the Labour party holds fast to its anti-racist tradition.” • This article was amended on 14 March 2024 to include further context of the content of Diane Abbott’s 2023 letter to the Observer, and to remove part of an excerpt from Abbott’s Guardian opinion article that was included in error.