What was said about Diane Abbott was shameful – the Tory party’s reaction is even more so

Editorial: All parties suffer from embarrassing gaffes from time to time but what matters is how those in leadership react. The Conservative Party has failed us all

Diane Abbott has reported the Tory’s biggest donor to the police over ‘deeply offensive and threatening’ remarks about her (AFP)

Was what the leading Tory donor Frank Hester said about Diane Abbott racist and sexist? The words, allegedly spoken at a private meeting of the software company he owns some years ago, are certainly not pretty.

They speak for themselves: “It’s like trying not to be racist, but you see Diane Abbott on TV, and you just want to hate all Black women because she’s there, and I don’t hate all Black women at all, but I think she should be shot.”

The fact that race and gender are the whole point of his remarks necessarily makes them racist and sexist, whatever personal philosophy Mr Hester may have tried to develop for himself about these societal challenges.

His disclaimer, “I don’t hate Black women at all”, is somewhat overwhelmed by the rest of the sentiments he expressed; and the invocation of violence, while not a serious incitement to assassination, is also deeply offensive.

No media outlet has been able to independently verify what Mr Hester reportedly said; but he has not denied the substance, and has attempted to contact Ms Abbott to apologise. Mr Hester is “deeply sorry”, and claims what he said had “nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.

In the spirit of the law in this area, we should ask whether Ms Abbott thinks them sexist and racist. It is clear that Ms Abbott does indeed find them so – enough to report him to the police as “deeply offensive and threatening”. In her words: “I’m a single woman and that makes me vulnerable anyway, but to hear someone talking like this is worrying… It is frightening.”

After some delay, and against his usual habit of sending ministers out to defend the indefensible, the prime minister has condemned what Mr Hester said as “racist”. Perhaps Rishi Sunak was moved to do so because his minister for equalities, Kemi Badenoch, had forced the pace by calling the racism out, and the growing disquiet within his own ranks and the scale of public outrage left him with no alternative. He should certainly have been moved by the powerful way that another politician of colour on the Conservative side was honest enough to declare that the words used by his party’s benefactor were “clearly racist and clearly sexist”.

More even than most politicians of colour, especially on the left, Ms Abbott has endured terrible racist and misogynistic abuse over the years. This is the price she has paid – and should never have had to pay – for being elected as Britain’s first Black MP in 1987, a pioneering achievement that seems even more formidable in retrospect, given that hateful prejudices were even more routine in the Britain she grew up in than they are today.

When she was first elected to represent the people of Hackney, the insults, death and rape threats arrived in the post and over the phone. She has been around at, or near, the top of politics long enough to have seen them migrate to social media, where they are amplified and multiply exponentially. It is unrelenting and takes considerable resilience to withstand the pressures. No wonder she gets frightened.

What Mr Hester said is one thing. All parties suffer from embarrassing gaffes – indeed, shameful ones – from time to time. What matters more is how a party’s leadership reacts; and, as ever the Conservatives at first made only the lamest of responses. It was only when Mr Sunak realised how isolated he might become that he did the right thing. Sometimes, even in politics, you can't defy reality.

Perhaps it has something to do with Mr Hester’s donation of £10m to the Tory cause, but the condemnation of him has been painfully slow. The fact that Mr Hester has made some of his estimated £450m fortune from contracts awarded by the NHS, where women of colour are well represented, makes it an even more uncomfortable episode.

As with the mild rebuke to Lee Anderson after his Islamophobic accusation that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is “mates” with Islamists, the Conservative Party clearly thinks that it can deal with misogyny and racism by playing them for as long as feasible. It is, sadly, part of the general party policy, set down by Boris Johnson, that such social evils are no longer much of a problem in the UK, and, to the extent that they are, are best dealt with by ignoring them. The word “Islamophobia” remains one that cannot be spoken by a senior Tory.

Ironically, ministers usually point to people of colour in senior political positions as proof of the transformation, and that, as Ms Badenoch has previously put it, with characteristic audacity, Britain is “the best country in the world to be Black”. Sadly, they never think to ask Ms Abbott, one of the most prominent of Labour figures in her time, if that accords with her experience. This would be a good moment for Mr Sunak to offer Ms Abbott all the support she needs to protect herself. She has contacted the police and the prime minister’s endorsement of that move would be helpful.

The latest episode proves three things about our governing party, none of them encouraging. The first is the dismal mixture of denialism and naivety that pervades its attitude to racism and misogyny. Second, it points to a leadership too much in thrall to its wealthiest donors.

Third, and pressingly, it is another sign of the party’s decay in power as it stumbles from crisis to crisis to its inevitable destruction at the general election.