Diane Abbott was born in Paddington in 1953. Her parents had arrived, separately, from Jamaica in 1950. Reginald, her father, was a machinist and then a sheet-metal worker; her mother, Julia, had been a nurse. In 1958, year of the Notting Hill riots, the family moved to Harrow, where Reg had bought a semi, though he held on to his multiple-occupancy house in Paddington, which he let. Later, they moved again to a house in Edgware with ‘extensive lawns’. 

In 1964, Diane went to Harrow County Grammar School for Girls, and in 1972 she won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she read history and learned ‘how to talk over men’. After Cambridge, she did stints at the Home Office, the National Council for Civil Liberties and Thames Television. After five years as a local councillor in Westminster, she was elected as MP for Hackney North in 1987. ‘Clean, indoor work’, as her friend Anni put it, ‘and no heavy lifting’.

At some point in the 1970s, Abbott found her way into the Livingstone London Left. She met Jeremy Corbyn on Blackpool seafront during the 1978 Labour Party conference and for a while shared a flat with him. They shared the same political views too: anti-apartheid, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, anti-Israel,