"When I arrived at Cambridge in 1975, a nervous freshman, I remember walking with a friend past Newnham and being introduced to a third-year undergraduate. She was attractive, witty, confident, well-connected, at home in the world of the ‘glittering prizes’ (the irritating phrase which gave its name to Frederick Raphael’s novel of that time). I envied her poise. Her name was Diane Abbott. Later, making many sacrifices for her career, she changed her accent, became ‘working-class’, and had a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn, but for me she will always be Diane, the posh goddess."
Two of my closest friends at Cambridge seemed destined for successful careers in politics. They were both Labour Party members who became chairmen of the Labour Club, and few of us doubted that they'd both end up in a Labour cabinet or shadow cabinet, probably as (shadow) Home Secretary and (shadow) Chancellor.
One of my politically-minded friends, an economics post-graduate, came from impeccable lower-middle/working-class London stock - his dad was a printer. He was comfortable with his background, talked about it openly and with affection, but never (as far as I can remember) claimed any sort of left-wing "authenticity" on its account. His easily imitable accent - a mixture of lower-class London and hoity-toity Oxbridge academic - was, I suppose, what used to be known as "Mayfair cockney". It was oddly endearing (as, indeed, was he), and sounded as if it had just ended up that way without any calculated modification. It was simply the way he spoke. He was at his funniest when anger or disgust would see him revert entirely to his roots. I can still hear him growling as he referred to a political enemy - a bearded Liverpudlian left-winger with severely impaired vision - as a "silly blind old cunt". I imagine he'd have been good at dealing with the communist union leaders who eventually destroyed the Labour Party a few years' later. And he would undoubtedly have been a gift to Mike Yarwood.
I never saw him dressed in anything other than an old dark-blue suit, crumpled white shirt and skinny tie (probably red to denote his political leanings). He was invariably baggy, messy and imperfectly shaved: he looked as if his clothes - and the rest of him - needed a good iron and a bit of a polish.
My other friend was a middle-class chap from Walton-on-Thames, whose father was a fairly senior civil servant, and who had been to school with me at KCS, Wimbledon. He had a standard educated South London accent, which, I noticed, he only ramped up to full posh when trying to crush an opponent in an argument, and which he dropped a few rungs down the social scale when addressing an audience of earnest young socialists. I don't think any of this was deliberate. Although his family lived in a large house in a pleasant suburb, he never mentioned this fact, but chose instead to bang on about his working-class left-wing grandfather, who had, in his youth, "fought the police" in Bristol, because they were instruments of the brutal capitalist boss class... or some such old bollocks. Given how often we heard about this supposed example of class warfare in action (which might of course have simply been an example of yobbish hooliganism) one might have imagined that fighting the police was his grandfather's chosen profession. Whatever, the ever-present memory of granddad's brave struggle against the forces of law and order evidently helped fuel his extreme left-wingery. He made a great effort to be chummy with the young men who served up our grub in college, which, unsurprisingly, seemed to embarrass them.
Neither of my friends carved out any sort of career in politics. The printer's son made the mistake of identifying Roy Hattersley as a future Labour leader, became a teacher at a distinguished private boarding school, decamped, first, to the SDLP, and is now a local councillor> He is, naturally, a Tory. The civil servant's son moved ineluctably leftwards, but neither practiced at the Bar (which had been his plan) nor became a politician. I've no idea what went wrong, as his brand of middle-class extreme left-wingery was all the rage in the Labour Party during the decade after he left university. Although there's no suggestion that he modified his political views, he was making a real name for himself in the Lord Chancellor's department (mainly under arch-Tory, Lord Hailsham) when he died. He might, I suppose, have risen to real prominence under Tony Blair - but not, presumably, as an MP. (My friend's younger brother became a Labour MP when Blair swept to power in 1997.)
So here's what I can't figure out. How did neither of these two extremely clever, articulate, energetic, charming, ambitious young men fail to make careers in front-line politics, while a charmless, dim-witted, hypocritical, nonsense-spouting waste of space like Diane Abbott is a front bench spokesperson, and is never off our fucking television screens? Mind you, I suppose we should be thankful that Labour seems to have such an unerring instinct for promoting its most gormless representatives.
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