DIANE ABBOTT claimed today she was treated as a “non-person” by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer as part of a drive to force her and the left out of Parliament.
Ms Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, told BBC Newsnight that her treatment was part of Sir Keir’s attempt to eliminate the left within the party.
Her claims come amid fresh revelations over the ways in which Sir Keir’s supporters worked to undermine and defeat his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
A book by a Guardian journalist states that Labour Together, the faction run by Sir Keir’s present political strategy director Morgan McSweeney, helped feed the press stories to undermine Mr Corbyn in 2018.
It even claims that Mr McSweeney believed that the worst thing that could happen to his personal project — defeating the left — would have been for Labour to win an election under Mr Corbyn’s leadership.
Ms Abbott said that she was targeted by the Starmer leadership as “one of the last leading leftwingers in the Parliamentary Labour Party [PLP].
“Keir Starmer is always saying, ‘It’s the new Labour Party’ … and how could you make it look more new than by getting rid of Diane Abbott,” she said.
The long-standing MP said that the Labour leader “never reached out to me personally and did treat me as a non-person” during the row over remarks by Tory donor Frank Hester, who had said that Ms Abbott made him want to “hate all black women” and that she “should be shot.”
She said: “You would have felt your party would have offered you more support, giving you advice on safety and security, even commiserated with you. And none of that happened.”
Ms Abbott was suspended from the PLP for more than a year after the publication of what she concedes was an “ill-advised” newspaper letter for which she immediately apologised.
Even after the investigation into her was concluded, she did not have the whip restored, in a transparent effort to make it impossible for her to stand for election again as a Labour candidate.
She said: “I think that Keir Starmer wanted to finish his clear-out of the left in the PLP.
“They were trying to string out the investigation so when a general election is around the corner, they could just move me out of the way as a Labour candidate because I wouldn’t be in the PLP, and they would parachute in someone else.”
A Labour Party spokesperson denied there was a plan to “push her out” and said Sir Keir “has great respect” for her.
