RISHI SUNAK was under mounting pressure today to get a grip on rampant racism in the Tory Party following a leading donor’s remarks saying Diane Abbott should be shot.
Politicians in both Labour and Tory parties denounced the call by businessman Frank Hester, who has given the Conservatives £10 million over the last year — but Mr Sunak stayed silent.
On Monday the Guardian reported that Mr Hester said at a meeting in 2019 that Ms Abbott, Britain’s first black female MP, made him want to “hate all black women,” before recommending her execution.
Former Tory chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said the reported comments were “clearly racist, and they’re clearly sexist” and unacceptable, adding that “the call to violence, even in a flippant way, is really inappropriate.”
But Tory ministers declined to describe the remarks as racist and ducked and dived to present Mr Hester in the best possible light.
As with former deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s Islamophobic attack on London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Conservatives dare not name the vice because of hard-right inner-party pressure.
The Tory Party was also reticent about calls by Labour and the Liberal Democrats for Mr Hester’s monster donations, believed to be the largest by an individual in political history, to be returned as tainted.
Labour peer and human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti described herself as being completely horrified at the Tory failure to denounce the racism as such, saying that such a failure ends up licensing these attitudes.
Ms Abbott, long the recipient of more abuse and prejudice than any other parliamentarian, called Mr Hester’s purported threat frightening.
She said: “For all of my career as an MP I have thought it important not to live in a bubble but to mix and mingle with ordinary people.
“The fact that two MPs have been murdered in recent years makes talk like this all the more alarming.
“I’m currently not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party but remain a member of the Labour Party itself, so I am hoping for public support from Keir Starmer.”
That arrived, in suitably muted form, from the party leader, who made no comment about his own persecution of Ms Abbott, suspended from the Labour whip for nearly a year, but said Mr Hester’s words were “abhorrent.”
“Diane has been a trailblazer, she’s probably faced more abuse than any other politician over the years,” he said, adding that “pretending that what was said wasn’t racist or anything to do with the fact she’s a woman: I don’t buy that.”
Campaign group Momentum dubbed this hypocritical, saying: “The Labour Party is complicit in the racist treatment of Diane. Restore the whip.”
A head of steam is building up for Starmer to restore the whip to Ms Abbott, with Labour MPs, former shadow chancellor Ed Balls and national executive member Mish Rahman demanding this yesterday
