When Diane Abbott moved house in 1980 and tried to switch her Labour membership from the Hampstead constituency to the Paddington branch, she was at first rebuffed. “I later learned that local Labour members had been told that a scarily radical Black woman had moved into the area and might try to join the party – and they were determined to keep me out,” she writes in her new memoir, A Woman Like Me.
It’s an astonishing revelation from a woman who would go on to break so many political barriers.
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