Published in 2020
352 pages
Dr Samara Linton (she/her) is an award-winning writer and multidisciplinary content producer. Her work includes The Colour of Madness: Mental Health and Race in Technicolour (2022) and Diane Abbott: The Authorised Biography (2020). She worked as a junior doctor before joining the BBC in 2019, where she went on to work in the Audio Science Unit as an assistant producer for several BBC World Service and Radio 4 programmes.
What is this book about?
On the night Margaret Thatcher secured a third consecutive general election victory in June 1987, history was made by a daughter of Jamaican immigrants as she became the first black woman to be elected to Parliament. Diane Abbott entered the House of Commons at a time when there were no black MPs in Parliament and when fewer than 5 per cent of MPs were women. Three decades on and she is one of the best-known figures in Westminster.
Among her supporters, Abbott is a trailblazer who has remained true to her principles and to her community. For her opponents, she is a gaffe-prone politician who is out of her depth. Embarking on her political career in the radical left-wing Labour movement, she rose through the ranks of her party to the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Cabinet, making history again as the first black person to shadow one of the great offices of state.
Diane Abbott: The Authorised Biography draws on original interviews with Abbott herself, her friends, her colleagues and her political opponents, as well as extensive archival research, to tell her remarkable story. Tracing Abbott’s path from her upbringing in north London on to Cambridge University, through roles in the civil service and the media, and from local politics into the heart of Westminster, this is a nuanced portrait of one of the most fascinating figures in British politics.
