How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Diane Abbott - ‘I’ve never had a nice chat with Keir Starmer’

Episode Date: September 18, 2024

Diane Abbott is a force of nature - and she needs to be, with so much vitriol directed towards her. She has weathered decades of racist and sexist abuse but has still blazed a trail through British politics as the first ever Black female MP. Not for nothing is she now known as ‘Mother of the House’. We talk about why some people (*cough* white, privately educated men in politics *cough*) are given multiple opportunities to fail upwards, while others aren’t and how she’s always felt the need to prove herself. We also discuss how, as the child of two Windrush generation parents, she had to stand up to her teachers in school when they told her Cambridge University ‘wasn’t for her’ and how she felt she failed in her degree. We chat about political failure in leadership and general elections, drinking Mojitos on public transport, anti-semitism and why she’s never had a ‘nice chat’ with Keir Starmer. Plus: dating ex-boyfriend Jeremy Corbyn (warning: involves much tinkering with socialist motorbikes). Have something to share of your own? I'd love to hear from you! Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com  Production & Post Production Manager: Lily Hambly    Studio and Mix Engineer: Gulliver Tickell and Josh Gibbs Senior Producer: Selina Ream Executive Producer: Carly Maile Head of Marketing: Kieran Lancini How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production.   Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Do nice guys really finish last? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. From New York to Tahiti, we'll examine villains undone by their villainy, monstrous self-devouring egos and accounts of the extraordinary power of decency. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. And everyone wants to be a student. Join for just $4.99 a month. Savings may vary. Eligibility and member terms apply. ["Savings May Vary"] ["Savings May Vary"] Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that encourages you to look at failure

a little differently, not as something that defines you, but potentially as something you can learn from. Before we get to our guest, it would feel remiss of me not to mention our special subscriber bonus podcast, Failing With Friends. This is where my guest stays in the studio a bit longer and answers your questions, and we read out and offer advice on some of your failures too. I also offer my behind the scenes reflections on my interaction

with the guest. Here's a bit of Diane Abbott to whet your appetite. If you think you're not going to quite make it, you won't. I've never believed that I'm not going to make it. And I think that gives you an edge. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my call-outs once a month on Instagram for quickfire questions. Listen on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa Play How To Fail With Elizabeth Day on Amazon Music. Diane Abbott is a woman of firsts. She was one of the first Black babies born in Paddington Hospital, West London, where her mother had to tell the curious nurses that her daughter

didn't have a tail, you know. She excelled at school and became the first in her family to attend Cambridge University, as well as the only state-educated black person to study there in the 1970s. After a career that took her to the home office and then into television, she joined the Labour Party and became the first black female MP in 1987. She was the first black woman to stand for leadership of a major British political party in 2010, the first black woman to shadow one of the four great offices of state, and the first to take Prime Minister's questions. Having retained her seat as Labour MP for Hackney this year at the age of 70, she now

holds the honorary title Mother of the House as the longest continuously serving female MP. A successful life then, but as becomes clear from her new memoir, A Woman Like Me, not one without its share of challenge. Her parents, Reginald, a welder, and Julia, a nurse, were part of the Windrush generation, and for all her life, Abbott has dealt with horrendous racist and sexist abuse as well as serious health issues after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2015. The practical barriers I have faced have been great, she writes in A Woman Like Me, and the psychological obstacles sometimes even greater. In a way, this has always been about feeling the need to prove myself.

Diane Abbott, welcome to How to Fail. It's a pleasure to be here. What a life. And it's still going. And I wanted to end on that quote because I do think so many people will be listening to this and see you as such an aspirational role model, and yet what you do so brilliantly in your memoir is that you write really candidly about the struggle that some of it has cost you. Who do you feel the need to prove yourself to?

I've always been the only black person in white institutions, whether it was grammar school, whether it was working in television, whether it was grammar school, whether it was working in television, whether it was in parliament. So I think I've always felt the need to prove myself to the wider society in the way that only a black person in a white society feels. So you feel the need to prove yourself to white people? It would be wrong to say that I'm intimidated by white people as such, but it is true that I felt the need to prove myself to a wider society which is white. Because one of the things that struck me when I was reading A Woman Like Me is that as a

child you had a strong sense of self. You knew that you wanted to go to Cambridge and you were going to do it and you knew you could do it even though your teachers advised you against it. It stands to reason that it's not that you're proving yourself to yourself, it feels like you've always known who you are. Yes, and I've always been quite definite about who I am and what I can do. My parents didn't go to university. Both my parents left school at 14. At school, they took us on little coach trips and I went on a coach trip to Cambridge and I was just completely amazed. I remember the coach driving down King's Parade and that's how I could see King's College. I think there was Trinity.

I just thought it was so beautiful and so amazing. But the thing that impressed me most of all were the students. The young people with their striped scarves walking along and to me they looked like princes and princesses. And I kept that sense of awe and wonder all the way till I went back to school the next day. We're going to come on to Cambridge because it feeds into one of your failures. But I want to go back to childhood Diane. What was she like? At age six, what was Diane Abbott like? Well, my brother would say that I've always been very bossy. Not even at age six, but at age one. There's a photograph in the book of my brother being christened. I'm standing a little bit ahead of my mother and father and

I'm whacking my finger, God knows who too. And as I say, my brother would say I've always been somebody that likes to take charge. And why did you call it a woman like me? I suppose because I wanted to indicate it was a distinct life experience, distinct from other people who had done the same things. Do you think that there's a tendency to lump, to use a very inelegant and inaccurate phrase, the black experience, to see it as sort of one homogenous whole? Yes, I think there is a tendency to oversimplify what the black experience is. I was writing this morning about Notting Hill Carnival, which is a fantastic artistic event, has often

suffered from a tendency to think that all black people are criminals. And so it's policed in a way that similar music festivals like Glastonbury, for instance, are not policed. So that tendency to lump us all together is mostly not to our advantage. When do you think you first became aware of that tendency? So your parents, as you say, they left school, they came over to the UK as part of the Windrush generation from Jamaica to a racist society. When did you first become aware of that? I didn't become aware of the racism until I went to university because my parents never spoke about race. It's only looking back now I can see how racism affected their lives. When things happened to me, we

are clearly, in retrospect, racist. I just thought people were being strange and silly. I didn't think they were being racist. There was a teacher at school, wasn't there, who said, why do you always have to be so different? Yes. And again, I just thought that was strange. There was another teacher at school who when I said I wanted to do the Oxford and Cambridge entrance said, well, I don't think you're up to it. And again, I just thought that was a random remark. What did you say to her?

But I do. And that's what matters, isn't it? Will you tell me a little bit about your grandmother, Miss Dye. I didn't meet her until I was in my early 20s and my mother took me home to visit Jamaica. Although she lived all her life in rural Jamaica, she was also a very dignified and very elegant woman. And whenever I've been in situations where I was nervous or felt a lot of pressure or felt some imminent challenge, I was always with my grandmother and how proud she was and how brave she was. And that helps me to be proud and brave as well. MS. And your parents, Reginald and Julia, now I think what comes across loud and clear already is how intellectually self-sufficient you are, but I think you're also emotionally self-sufficient

because their relationship was quite fractious, wasn't it, and they split up. And I think you probably had quite a troubled relationship with your father reading between the lines of your relationship was quite fractious, wasn't it? And they split up. And I think you probably had quite a troubled relationship with your father reading between the lines of your memoir. But you don't harp on about it. You made your own way. And I wonder how you feel about your parents now, looking back at times, he must have absorbed a lot of racism and a lot of unpleasantness in the outside world. And what he did was bring his rage home. And I didn't understand that then. And it's only now I can see that he internalized a lot of painfulness, which he couldn't respond to in the outside world because he would have

lost his job or whatever, but he took it out on us. My mother was different. She was much more caring and much easier to get on with. It was a fractal relationship with my father, but I can see why he was the way he was. And also, he was a decisive influence in my life in one simple way, which was when I was born, my mother wanted to send me home to Miss Dye to be brought up like most of my cousins were. And it was my father that put his foot down and insisted, no, no, she's staying here because I was his first child. And in a way, had I gone back to Jamaica to be brought up, I'd have had a great time and I've had a great childhood and I probably would have done well in life. But there's no doubt in my mind that

had I been sent home to Jamaica to be brought up, I wouldn't be a British MP today. This podcast, as you know, is all about failure. And I'm only too well aware that there are certain people in society who are given multiple opportunities to fail upwards. And there are others who, when they make a mistake, it seems to carry so much more significance because of what they represent. Do you think we are harder on you, Diane Abbott, when you make a mistake than we would be on a white, privately educated male MP? I'm afraid I have no doubt about that and sometimes I have to remind myself of that because you have a sort of barrage of attacks and denigration in the media

which can be very upsetting. I have to remind myself that if I was a white man, I would be allowed mistakes, but I've never been allowed a mistake. Do you worry about failure and making mistakes now, or are you past the point of worry? You're always worried because of the response you'll get in the media, but I anticipate that I'm going to get a very unpleasant response if I make a mistake. And I try my best not to make mistakes, but sometimes you do slip up. I sort of want to ask you about the Mojito, only because it became legendary. And it sort of went viral for the right reasons, which was, let's leave Diane Abbott alone. She's just having a can of Mojito and you owned

that mistake very quickly. But I wonder how you feel about M&S can Mojito nowadays. Oh, I still drink it occasionally. Do you? Would you recommend? Well, it's great. I wouldn't recommend doing it if you're a public figure and in public, but I would recommend it as a drink. It's another thing that you write about in a woman like me actually is the rise of celebrity culture and the smartphone making it almost impossible for you to have any kind of private life. How difficult has that been?

I was used to being able to meet with my friends or just relax and enjoy myself. And nowadays, because of the smartphone, you have to be very, very careful what you do publicly. And it took me a little while to adjust to that. And do you feel you've also been pressurized into speaking publicly about things you might have wanted to keep private? For instance, the fact that you have diabetes. I've never wanted to be treated as a victim and that goes all the way back to childhood. So the reason I didn't want to talk about my health was because of that. Yeah, I didn't like talking about my health, not necessarily because I wanted to keep it private, but because

I didn't want people to feel sorry for me. Why not? If you think of yourself as a victim too often, you can hold yourself back. You can internalise the notion that you are someone who has less opportunities and is entitled to do less things than other people. Let's move on to your failures. Your first failure, so having excelled at school and got into grammar school and in spite of the advice of your dunderheaded teacher, you got into Cambridge to study history. But your first failure is your failure to get a first. Throughout my academic career, I've sailed through whether it was O-level, whether it was A-level,

whether it was doing the Oxford and Cambridge entrance. Because in those days, in order to go to Oxford and Cambridge to do an art subject, in other words, a subject which wasn't a scientific subject, you had to do Latin. Now, fortunately for me, I had done Latin O level. But the requirement of Latin meant that a lot of other state school children could not have gone in. So I did the special exam, I did my Latin paper, I went for interview, I got in. So I just had a history from the

very young Diane Abbott to the Diane Abbott that got into Cambridge at a time when there were very few working class children going to Cambridge, let alone black children. I had a certain amount of confidence in my ability to sail through academically. And when I didn't get a first at Cambridge, that came as something of a shock. How did you process it? I processed it as a stage of relatively easy academic success. That stage in my life was over. Did you internalize that failure? Did you see it as a failure of not having worked hard enough for instance, or was it something else? I felt I had hit the ceiling. But then I went on to apply to join

the civil service and I passed that set of exams. My sense of myself as able and successful was restored. It becomes clear reading your autobiography that there were only two other non-white undergraduates at Newnham College at the time that you were there. I wonder if you felt that there was a lack of support for people from diverse backgrounds because it was so monocultural. That wasn't what life was like in the 70s. I just took it on myself that I didn't get a first. You also write about having experienced racism while you were at Cambridge with your then boyfriend Peter when you went on a walk one day.

Would you mind telling us what happened? He was at Bath and I was at Cambridge and we used to travel to see each other. He came to see me at Cambridge and we were walking back to the station. I think we may even have been walking back hand in hand. Then suddenly some schoolboys leant out of the windows of their school and hurled abuse at me. And both of us were very taken aback. And that was one of the experiences of racism which stands out in my mind. What did history, your degree, teach you about race? There was nothing that I could study which was about race either in a British context

or an overseas context and there was nothing about empire. There was nothing. What I was very keen to do afterwards was to read about race and black writers and black poets. It was something I had to compensate for. But then, you know, Oxbridge in those days, there were a lot of issues they didn't touch on in English and history. Well, education has become something that you have campaigned on through the years and it's clearly something that's very important to you personally. One of the bits in the book that I can't stop thinking about is when your father in a rage drove away with all of your books and you had loved reading so much and these books are some of your best friends

and you never saw them again. That was terrible. That's one of the reasons why I felt my father was quite harsh. He came to Cambridge for my graduation. Even though I had a relatively bad relationship with my father, I thought it was so important that my parents were there, maybe because I was the only one of two black girls at Newham. So we came and he started sort of blustering on and being rude generally. I think, well, I know it was because he felt intimidated. He was there in the gardens of Newham. It was full of the parents and their daughters who all came from very middle-class backgrounds. He was the only black man there, and he was reacting to that.

But I just thought it was my father being difficult. Anyway, we had a sort of skirmish, and he came out of my room, and he drove off. And it wasn't until he had driven off, I realized he'd taken all my books with him. And I had kept every book that I had ever taken all my books with him and I had kept every book I had ever bought, all the way to books I had bought as a child. And that was probably one of the most coruscating things that he did to me. This message is brought to you by LinkedIn. Are you struggling to close deals? B2B selling is tougher than ever and that's why I want to tell you about LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

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You will find it at York University School of Continuing Studies, where we offer career programs purpose-built for you. Visit continue.yorku.ca. We've touched on the importance of education, not only for you personally, but specifically for black children who are so often overlooked in the state system. Talk to us about sending your son to private school, because I know that there'll be people listening to this who want to hear what you have to say on it, and you'll probably sift the back teeth of it, and you write about it in the

book, but just explain that to us. For me, education had been a ladder up from the position of working class West Indians of my parents' generation. And I've never forgotten that. And I wanted that for all children, particularly black children. And I did a lot of work around education. And one of the things I realized that it wasn't just working class children who were failed by the system. It wasn't just black children who were failed by the system. It was black boys in particular. And black boys were more likely to be excluded.

And I always remember there was a director general of the prison Service who said, on the day that you exclude a child from school, you might as well give them a date and time to turn up at prison. And I've never forgotten that. And I had only the one son and I felt guilty about being an MP and not being there for him enough. And I was determined that he wouldn't go on that trajectory from school to prison. And I agonized about whether to send him to a state school or whether to send him to a private school because I believe in the state system, but more to the point, I knew I'd be attacked for sending him to a private school. In the end, it was his choice. But as I expected, I was reigned with abuse for sending him to a private school. Some of those people were

people that genuinely believed in the state system, but some of those people were people that just wanted an excuse to attack Diane Abbott. He called into a radio station, didn't he, to defend you? There was all of this abuse and attacks and so on. But one of the saddest things was, there was one day I was in parliament and he was at home with his nanny and she was upstairs for some reason, he was downstairs and he was listening to the radio and he heard a call-in show on LBC and the subject was me and everyone was ringing in to attack me for sending him to a private school and very sadly he felt the need to ring up and defend me and he was only 11 and they should never have let him on air. And I've always felt very sad and very guilty

that my 11 year old son felt the need to defend his mother. I suppose it's so difficult, isn't it? Because as humans, we are multifaceted and complex and contradictory a lot of the time. And yet, as politicians, there's an expectation that you will live your political values. And I wonder where you land on that spectrum, because the way you explain it, I completely agree with everything that you've just said. But how much do you feel that as a flawed person who is also a politician, you should live those values. I am a flawed person, but I didn't send my son to private school because I'm a flawed person. I sent my son to private school because knowing what I knew about the way the state system dealt with black boys, I felt I couldn't do anything

else. I lived in another part of the country perhaps, but heck me, and black boys, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. In the end, your children have to come first. And you still campaign for a world that exists where the state system is not a fast track to prison for black boys. And I suppose that's your fundamental argument is that that's not mutually exclusive. You can still campaign for that and want that world to exist and be realistic about the world that we currently live in? I remember the day that the story broke in the press. Harriet Harmon called me. And Harriet and I are on different wings of the Labour Party.

But I'd known her before I became an MP, because we were both young feminists working for an organization which is now known as Liberty, but was then known as the National Council for Civil Liberties. So I've known her since then, and she rang me that morning. She'd sent her son to a selective school and we were criticized for that. And she rang me that morning and said, are you all right? And she also said, you mustn't stop campaigning around education because if you don't do it, nobody will. Thank you, Diane. Your second failure is that in 2010, you stood for the Labour leadership and you failed to win that

contest. Why did you choose this one? Well, it was a great failure, but I had no sense of failure because I wasn't expected to win. It was a great experience actually. There was me and there were four special advisors, people that would work for Labour ministers. There was Ed Miliband, David Miliband, Ed Balls and Andy Burnham. You were outnumbered by white men called Ed. Absolutely, absolutely. And they all had, they had resources, they had backing and so on. And I had nothing except a few volunteers. And yet at the end, because it was an electoral college with three sections, MPs, trade unions and members, and in the membership section, I came third behind Ed Balls and Andy Burnham.

So I felt quite proud of that. So it was a failure, but it was a failure that in some ways was a success because I did so much better than anybody expected. But also I learned something which the wider Labour Party was only to learn in five years' time was only to learn in five years' time that the party, the grassroots, had begun to be fed up with new labour. Do you think you'll see a black leader of the Labour Party in your lifetime? I would hope so, just as I would hope you'll see a black female leader of the United States Democratic Party in my lifetime. Yes, let's keep everything crossed. I wanted to ask you about the racism because there

was this Amnesty International report that found that you were the subject of almost half of all abusive tweets about female MPs on Twitter during the 2017 election campaign. So this is seven years on from this leadership campaign. But that you received 10 times more abuse than any other MP. Diane, how do you cope with that? It's very hard. In recent years, I don't look at the abuse that comes in online. My staff do. But even then, I had someone that came to work for me who said, after a few weeks, I never thought I would see the word **** so often. I had another young woman that came to work for me, a black

young woman, who had thought about being an MP but changed her mind when she saw what I had to put up with. It is very difficult and sometimes you think, why am I doing this? But in the end, you have to carry on because if you don't carry on, you're not really preparing the way for others. And it's so important that we have a politics which reflects society as a whole. Have you ever got to the point where you wanted to quit? Oh, yeah. I remember, and this wasn't because of online abuse, it could

have just general abuse in the media. I can't remember what particular story it was, but I remember really deciding I can't put up with this anymore. And I called one of the men who I had come in with in 1987. There were four of us, including myself. I said, do you know what? I've had enough. I'm stepping down. He said to me, you can't step down, Diane. You have forgotten what it took to get here. I didn't step down and I carried on. I imagine that vile racist online abuse from anonymous avatars is one thing, but when it comes from Frank Hester, a high-profile Tory donor, and when he says unforgivable things about you naming you, that that's another thing altogether? Yes, it kind of got to me partly because this wasn't just some random nutcase online, this was the biggest Tory donor. And partly because there was something about it being

completely public, which was difficult, and I felt like I had a target on my back. And the other reason it really got to me was the attitude of the Labour Party at the time. On the Monday, I think it was Annelies Dobbs, who was the equality shadow minister at the time, she tweeted something about Frank Hester, which didn't talk about race and didn't talk about me. And I thought, do they really think they're going to carry on attacking Frank Hester without mentioning me? And the next morning said to her, have you reached out to Diane? And she just squirmed and said, well, I've been in a meeting all morning. Because she hadn't, nobody in the

party leadership had reached out to me, even though the Frank Esser story had been in The Guardian for 24 hours. So after that, she very quickly messaged me and Keir Stammer quickly messaged me. They didn't reach out to me in any meaningful way. They didn't say, well, can we help you with the media? How are your staff? What can we do? So yeah, that was a very difficult time. You mentioned you had the whip removed. It was because of a letter that you wrote to the Observer and you have subsequently said that they were ill-judged and clumsy comments. You were accused of antisemitism, you had the whip very quickly removed, and then there was this investigation

and you had to go on an awareness course that you went on. But it was dealt with in a way that seems unusual. And I wonder whether you think that is because you are seen as too left-wing for your own party, that there's an awkwardness to you, that the party leadership doesn't know how to handle. Well, first of all, I apologized within hours of the letter being published online. What was odd was when Keir Starmer was asked about the letter in less than 24 hours after it was in the observer, he said that he thought it was anti-Semitic. And that was strange because Kirsten was the barrister and he would know you can't have an investigation to something if you have already said publicly what your conclusion is. So I never felt the investigation would amount to much. I filled in a form and that was it. No one ever spoke to me and no one ever spoke to the observer. They asked me to do a course,

a course in anti-Semitism or racism, I think. Now, I've spent 40 years campaigning against racism and anti-Semitism and I thought it was a little bit strange to be made to do a course, but I did the course. But the investigation wore on. Why do I think that they made such a big issue of a letter to the observer when I'd apologize for it very quickly? Why do I think they tried to say that someone that spent a lifetime campaigning against racism was somehow anti-Semitic? I think it was really because I was one of the last prominent Corbyn supporters in the Parliamentary Labour

Party and they were on a mission to clear out all of us. You were then allowed to stand again as MP for Hackney and you won 60% of the vote. Do you think that there is still an attempt to sideline you because of that? Well, let's be clear, it wasn't so much that I was allowed to stand. I had been reselected by my local party unanimously. So it wasn't that they allowed me to stand, it's that they backed off from trying to ban me. It's a slightly different thing. They wanted to have a little clear out. And some of my colleagues on the left said they were very relieved when I stood up to the leadership because they felt that if I hadn't stood up to them and I had been

expelled, they would have been next in line. They felt the leadership wanted a mini clear out and because I didn't blink, I saved them. Or spring break with the whole fam and a whole lot of sunblock. Or even book last minute and go on a whim. Choose from over 130 airlines on last minute or peak season travel with no points hike. Switch to RBC Avion Visa and get up to 55,000 bonus Avion points. Limited time offer, condition supply. Visit rbc.com slash Avion.

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the power of pro. Get your LG Grand Pro today. Pro anytime, anywhere. We're about to get onto Jeremy Corbyn. It forms part of your final failure, but before we do so, we're speaking at the end of a summer where we have seen rioting prompted by the tragic incident at Southport. And I wonder, as a prominent black woman, whether you feel Britain has more of a problem with race or with gender, and whether it's getting better, either one. I think both issues, race and gender, have got better since I went into public life.

You only have to look at the numbers of women in parliament, the numbers of black MPs, and also the numbers of women and black people in senior professional roles, which you wouldn't have seen when I came down from Cambridge. But I think the more serious issue is race. Because you don't have thugs beating up women on the street, but we have seen this summer thugs beating up black and Asian people on the street. Are you hopeful for the future? Oh, I'm hopeful for the future because I'm a person that's always hopeful. I wouldn't have had the career I've had if I wasn't hopeful. I am slightly taken aback that with the racist violence we've seen this year, that some commentators and some politicians

are trying to tiptoe around the issue of race and Islamophobia and just call it thuggery, the issue of race and Islamophobia and just call it thuggery because it is racist violence. My view is that if you don't say that and if you don't call it out, violence like that will happen again. I totally agree with you. It's domestic terrorism. Yeah. When was the last time you had a nice chat with Keir Starmer then? I've never had a nice chat with Keir Starmer. Never. I mean, that's partly because people forget Keir Starmer has been in the Labour Party a relatively short time. He was obviously director of public prosecutions and he couldn't join the Labour Party, but he retired as DPP, I think it was 2014, and he was selected as the Labour MP in 2015. So he doesn't really have a history in the Labour Party. So there's no reason that we would have come

across each other. I had more nice conversations with his predecessor, Frank Dobson, who is a very nice man than I've ever had with Keir Starmer. So if he calls you up for a cup of tea, will you say yes? Oh yeah, you know, I'm a very open-minded person. We'll put it out there. I know he listens religiously to how to fail. I'm only kidding he doesn't. Okay, final failure is failure as part of Jeremy Corbyn's team to win the 2019 general election. Before we get onto that, I want to talk about Jeremy Corbyn, your ex-boyfriend, because that is one of the most affectionate and entertaining chapters of your book. I particularly loved the anecdote

about the camping trip to France. Will you tell us what happened there? Because you were looking forward to some lovely meals out in French restaurants. What happened? We went on his motorbike and I was on the back of the motorbike, something I couldn't dream of doing now. And being Jeremy, it was a socialist motorbike. It was made in East Germany, but it kept breaking down. And so we had to be by the side of the road whilst Jeremy mended it. Now for Jeremy, mending his motorbike was a heavenly experience. It's his idea of a holiday. But for me, it was extremely irritating.

Anyway, we finally got down to the south of France and he unpacked his motorbike and I realized he brought all the food we were going to eat on the back of his motorbike. But he had things like instant noodles and baked beans and just a lot of processed instant food. And I was horrified. I think the one thing about coming to the South of France is that we would have lots of lovely meals. So I put this to Jeremy and he was a bit taken aback. And in the end, we had a sort of compromise in that we went for one lovely meal, but for the rest of our meals, I had to eat all this processed rubbish. This was in the 1980s? This would have been in the 1980s. Yes. And I have to say, you are very nice about

him in the book. And even though that relationship didn't last, what clearly comes across is that this is a man whose values have never changed, whether it's socialist motorbikes and instant noodles, or whether it's standing up for the people who traditionally have been voiceless in our political system. Therefore, I imagine that this failure to win the 2019 general election went very deeply. Did it feel like a rejection at some level of these very left-wing values that you lived by? The thing about the failure in 2019 was that it was all the more painful because first of all, Jeremy had won the leadership in 2015 when nobody expected him to. Not even Jeremy, I think, in a way. People forget in

2017 that we had a very good result. We got very close to the Tories. In fact, they had to go into coalition with the DUP, the Unionist party in Northern Ireland, in order to keep power. Also, we had more votes than a series of general elections before that. So we were very optimistic and we were very hopeful. The terrible result in 2019 was the more upsetting. Because from an outside perspective, it felt like the campaign running up to the election was so energized and dynamic and refreshing, and you had this ground swell of youth support. How did it feel inside the campaign? Oh it felt like that. Jeremy in particular got a lot of support from young people. He was the first and last Labour leader to be serenaded at an outdoor music festival

and what he stood for excited a lot of enthusiasm. It was very difficult when we lost like that and lost so severely. I think that for the right of the Labour Party and the establishment, somebody as left-wing as Jeremy becoming leader of the Labour Party was a near-death experience. It was just so shocking and so unexpected for them. From 2017 to 2019, they spent their time attacking Jeremy personally. And in the end, I think it was partly Brexit, which was a difficult issue for Jeremy because he was kind of a little bit supportive of Brexit, but the party was very strongly for Remain. So we had to kind of tread a line on that. But also because of the terrible abuse that he had to endure, combination of those things was why it did so badly in 2019.

Is it quite surreal seeing your ex-boyfriend become leader of the Labour Party and potentially prime minister? It wasn't surreal. It happened on the basis of his values. And I had always supported those values. It wasn't surreal. It happened on the basis of his values and I had always supported those values. It wasn't surreal at all. Has he read the book? No, he hasn't read the book because the book hasn't been published yet. No, but you might have given him a sneaky PDF.

No, I said to him, do you mind me writing about you in the book, you know, the motorbike trip and so on. And he said, fine, absolutely fine. There are other ex-boyfriends that I had to spell out what I was going to say, but Jeremy was fine. Diane, it's been such a pleasure to meet you. Do you think you're a workaholic? I don't think I'm a workaholic, but my commitment to my political work has overshadowed my other interests like my interest in art. Do you ever foresee a moment that you might retire, step back and have more time to indulge those interests? Oh, absolutely.

Just not yet? If the leadership of the party hadn't gone around publicly saying they were going to ban me and stop me running, in a way, I might have retired at that point, but I wasn't going to be pushed around. What a note to end this interview on. Thank you so, so much for your openness, for your candor. And I'd like to end, if I may, by reading a quote from Nosheen Iqbal's profile of you in Vogue, where she wrote, if Abbott has sometimes been a thorn in Labour's side, she's also helped steer its moral compass. Thank you so much, Diane Abbott, for coming on How to Fail.

I've enjoyed it. And you're going to stay for Failing with Friends, which is the bit where you get to be agony on Abbott. I can't wait for that. We heartily recommend you follow us to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends, even your enemies, and not Fosse. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.