‘I acquired no help after Tory donor mentioned I needs to be shot,’ Diane Abbott says

Diane Abbott has said the Labour party failed to support her “in any meaningful way” after vile racist comments from a Tory donor emerged.

The Labour MP said she was only contacted by Keir Starmer after a then-shadow minister was asked on TV if she’d reached out to Ms Abbott. She also accused the PM of treating her like a “non-person” during the race row.

In March it was reported that Frank Hester, the Tories’ biggest donor, said Ms Abbott made him want to “hate all Black women” and that he thought she “should be shot”. Speaking on the How to Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, Ms Abbott said Anneliese Dodds, now the Equalities Minister, failed to contact her, only posting a tweet about Mr Hester that “didn’t talk about race and didn’t talk about me”.

She continued: “[Ms Dodds] was on Sky and the interviewer said to her: ‘Have you reached out to Diane?’ And she just squirmed and said: ‘Oh, I’ve been in a meeting all morning.’ Because she hadn’t, nobody in the party leadership had reached out to me, even though the Frank Hester story had been in the Guardian for 24 hours.

“So after that, she very quickly messaged me. And Keir Starmer quickly messaged me. They didn’t reach out to me in any meaningful way. They didn’t say: ‘Well, can we help you with the media? How are your staff? What can we do?’ So yeah, that was a very difficult time.”

In a separate interview with BBC Newsnight, Ms Abbott said Mr Starmer “did treat me as a non-person” during the row. She continued: “If somebody was threatening to have you shot, you would have felt your party would have offered you more support, giving you advice on safety and security, even kind of commiserated with you. And none of that happened.”

In the latest podcast with Day, Ms Abbott said she’d “never had a nice chat” with Mr Starmer, which she said was partly because he had been in the Labour Party for “a relatively short time”. He has been an MP since 2015. But she said she was a “very open minded person” and would go for a cup of tea if he asked.

Ms Abbott, who became the first Black female MP when she was elected in 1987, said the row was particularly challenging because of how “completely public” it was. “This wasn’t just some random nutcase online,” she said. “This was the biggest Tory donor… I felt like I had a target on my back.”

The trailblazing politician has faced racism throughout her political career, with research showing she received almost half of all the abusive tweets sent to female MPs in the run-up to the 2017 general election. She said: “It’s very hard. In recent years, I don’t look at the abuse that comes in online. My staff do. But even then, I had someone that came to work for me who said, after a few weeks, I never thought I would see the word ‘n***er’ so often.

“I had another, a young woman that came to work for me, a black young woman, who had thought about being an MP, but changed her mind when she saw what I had to put up with. It is very difficult and sometimes you think, why am I doing this? But in the end, you have to carry on. Because if you don’t carry on, you know, you’re not really preparing the way for others.”

When Mr Hester’s alleged comments were first reported, a spokesman for his company said: “Frank Hester accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin. The Guardian is right when it quotes Frank saying he abhors racism, not least because he experienced it as the child of Irish immigrants in the 1970’s.”

How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is available wherever you get your podcasts.