I’d waited a long time to ask Diane Abbott some questions.
Well, seven years and one question to be specific.
I’d always had a lot of time for this doughty daughter of Jamaican immigrants who became the country’s first black woman MP in 1987, and remained the only one for a decade.
Two years before she won the Hackney seat, I took over her desk in Ken Livingstone’s GLC press office and heard only praise for her talent and principles.
But when I heard in 2003 that she’d taken her 11-year-old son James out of the state education system and sent him to the £10,000-a-year City of London School, I was gobsmacked by her hypocrisy.
Here was a staunch socialist who for two decades had stood up for the underdog and railed against privilege.
Here was a conviction politician from the Left who’d attacked senior Labour figures for putting their kids in selective schools going one step further.
Putting her son in a far more exclusive school and buying him even better life-chances.
How could she do it? Now that she’s put herself forward to lead the Labour Party I had the chance to ask her in her Westminster office. This is how it went:
BRIAN READE You’ve said that going to Cambridge University politicised you because you saw a lot of rich kids walking into Oxbridge at the expense of those from state schools.
Yet you sent your son to public school. Why?
DIANE ABBOTT Well, since I made that decision Labour built five new secondary schools in Hackney, one of them with some of the best GCSE results in the country. I wouldn’t have to make the same choice today.
BR But why did you make that choice at all?
DA I’d done a lot of work on how black boys underachieve in secondary schools so I knew what a serious problem it was.
I knew what could happen to my son if he was sent to the wrong school and got in with the wrong crowd.
I realised they were subjected to peer pressure and when that happens it’s very hard for a mother to save her son.
Once a black boy is lost to the world of gangs it’s very hard to get them back and I was genuinely very fearful of what could happen.
BR But you criticised Harriet Harman and Tony Blair for sending their kids to selective schools then you went and sent yours to a fee-paying one?
DA I didn’t really criticise Harman.
BR You said what she did made Labour look like they’re saying one thing while doing another.
DA Yes, I did say that. But that was the only criticism I made.
BR But couldn’t you see why there was anger? People on the left thought ‘we’re not surprised that Blair and Harman did it but we don’t understand why Diane Abbott did it because she’s one of us’?
DA Yes, but they didn’t understand me. I’m a West Indian mum and West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.
It’s that kind of atavistic streak that we have. I can see them in the market on a Saturday morning. A kind of ‘touch my children and we’ll turn quite difficult’.
Interestingly, until now, it’s the one thing that’s got me the most positive response from black women locally. They would come up to me and shake my hand. Because ultimately in their eyes it’s about doing the right thing for their children. But obviously people from other cultures didn’t see it that way at all.
BR I’m guessing those black women couldn’t afford to do what you did yet you’re saying they shook your hand?
DA Exactly. Yes. That’s what you and some of my colleagues on the Left would never understand. In the end you’re coming from a culture where whatever you can do for your children you do.
BR But weren’t you effectively letting the other black boys sink while helping your own son to swim and not really caring about what happened to those left behind?
DA No, no, no. It wasn’t about me saying I don’t care what happens to other boys.I’ve done so much work to help those kind of children. You can go online and check.
BR So why did you say at the time that what you did was indefensible?
DA Well it was intellectually indefensible. The idea that you have to pay to send your child to school is.
But when it came to having to make a very difficult decision for my son, I had to choose between him and my career and I chose my son. For me, of West Indian origin, that was a no-brainer.
BR But you’re now standing to be party leader at a time when education is such a massive issue, particularly with two public schoolboys running the country.
If you became leader how could you take Labour’s total belief in state education to the country knowing you’ve done something with your own son that you called indefensible?
DA Well it’s no more a problem than it is for Ed Balls who actually went to a public school. I didn’t go.
BR Making that decision though must have caused you a lot of pain and soul-searching over the years? (there’s a five second silence as she stares upwards)
DA When I’m on my death bed I won’t say ‘I wish I’d had the opportunity to do more for my career’.
I want to say, ‘I did the best for my family’. I don’t think you can have pain and soul-searching doing the right thing for your child. That’s to get your priorities and values upside down.
BR But you’re a conviction politician?
DA I’m a mother first.
BR Yes, but you’re compartmentalising: You’ve made your decision as a mother but then you have to go back to work and face...
DA Face who? Face what? (silence) No. It was something I did which people who don’t like me go on and on about.
I was a single-mother when I made that decision (she was married to her son’s father, architect Richard Thompson, between 1991-93).
I didn’t have anyone to discuss it with. It was just me throwing these options around in my head. I was worried and isolated. I’m not the only Labour MP who sent their child to public school but I’m the only one who’s questioned about it.
BR Why do you think that is?
DA Because there isn’t much else to criticise me for.
BR So there are other things? Such as?
DA They say I’m disloyal to Labour but I voted for everything in the manifesto. I’ve been loyal to the party but not necessarily to the leaders.
BR There’s also your cosying-up to Michael Portillo on the BBC couch?
DA Some of my colleagues resent that but I think it’s just jealousy. Michael and I don’t socialise.
He has a lot of grand Tory friends while my friends are people from my own background. People who’ve known me for years. I am ultimately just a West Indian girl made good.
BR You have been vilified and patronised in equal measure (Abbott’s 56, but looks years younger).
Currently you’re being described as Labour’s “token” candidate, which, considering you’ve been an MP for well over twice as long as all the other leadership rivals, is an insult on many levels.
DA There’s always this assumption if you’re a black person who’s done something, that someone has given you a bye.
That you’re less qualified than the white equivalent. In this race I’d argue that if anything, with the exception of not having been a New Labour minister I’m more qualified.
James is 18 now, has just finished his international baccalaureate, and is hoping to go to Cambridge University. It’s not my place to forgive what she did with him but if it was I’d struggle.
I struggle with her defence that it’s a West Indian mum thing.
As though non-Caribbean mothers don’t face the same problems in inner-city schools and wouldn’t fight to the death for their sons.
And I struggle with the thought that, while her public school-educated son is off to a top university, few, if any, of those black Hackney boys he left behind, will join him.
But I think the immigrant’s daughter- turned-single mother has had a tougher life than we gave her credit for. And the doubling of her majority at the last election proves the people in Hackney, those who matter most to her, know that.
I’m glad she stood for the leadership. Not only so she can dilute, as she says, one of the narrowest gene pools in political history, but so I could finally ask why she made me lose all respect for her.
And hear her defend the indefensible.