AGGRESSIVE racism by the Tory Party’s top donor rocked both sides of the political establishment today as it struggled to cope with poisonous attacks on Britain’s first black woman MP.
Premier Rishi Sunak was resisting demands to return the £10 million the Tories have received from businessman Frank Hester, who said in 2019 that Diane Abbott made him want to “hate all black women” and called for her to be shot.
And Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was put on the spot by Ms Abbott herself over growing demands to restore the parliamentary whip to her nearly a year after it was suspended.
Commons exchanges were dominated by Mr Hester’s reported remarks about Ms Abbott, which the Prime Minister, after a day of vacillation, finally conceded were “racist and wrong.”
That was as much as Mr Sunak was willing to concede, rejecting calls to hand back the vast fortune Mr Hester has contributed to the Tories’ re-election fund.
The Scottish Tories joined in the clamour to spurn the tainted money, indicating that Mr Sunak’s own party is far from united behind his inability to deal with the racists in its ranks.
But the Prime Minister appeared to believe that Mr Hester’s apology — for being “rude” — and the fact that the Tories have an ethnically diverse cabinet were sufficient to wipe the slate clean.
Indeed, some leading Tories have denied that Mr Hester was racist at all, and others said they would welcome further donations from him.
The one voice not heard in the Commons was that of Ms Abbott herself, who was bizarrely not called to ask a question by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle, despite his purported concern about threats to MPs which led him to tear up parliamentary rules in the recent Gaza debate.
Ms Abbott stood repeatedly to catch the Speaker’s eye, symbolically flanked by Zarah Sultana and Apsana Begum, the two Muslim women MPs who are among the toughest of the parliamentary left.
She later slammed the Speaker for not serving democracy, given that most of prime minister’s questions was devoted to talking about her, a black woman under the shadow of a racist death threat.
Ms Abbott told the Morning Star she had been intending to ask: “Has the PM considered that if he was a little black child watching how it took his party 24 hours to say that insisting that a black woman politician should be shot was racist that that might make that young child think twice before entering politics altogether?”
The Speaker’s office made procedural excuses, which were politically tone-deaf at least.
Ms Abbott was approached by Sir Keir in the Commons, asking what the party could do to support her. Ms Abbott in response demanded the restoration of the parliamentary whip, without which she will not be able to stand for Labour at the general election.
Labour’s spokesman was unable to explain why she has been “under investigation” for a full 11 months over a newspaper letter but did allow that it would have been better if she had been heard in the Commons.
However, left MP Andy MacDonald, suspended after a speech at a pro-Palestine rally referencing the phrase “from the river to the sea,” had the whip restored today in a move that can only increase the pressure on Labour over Ms Abbott.
Veteran Labour MP Harriet Harman, a former deputy leader of the party, and former shadow chancellor Ed Balls are among those calling for Ms Abbott to be restored to the parliamentary party’s ranks.
Westminster sources are now predicting that, with Tory donors calling for her death, Sir Keir will have little choice but to do the right thing.
In the Commons, Sir Keir called the Prime Minister “tongue-tied” in his response to Mr Hester’s “racist and misogynist” comments, and Scottish National Party Westminster leader Stephen Flynn denounced him for “putting money before morals” after the “racist, odious and downright bloody dangerous” words by his donor.
Labour kept up the pressure, with party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds saying that Mr Sunak should “pay back the money in full, cut ties with Mr Hester and apologise unequivocally to Diane Abbott.”
