There comes a moment in every thoughtful person’s life when the universe stages a practical joke so exquisite that one is forced to question not merely one’s political compass but the very integrity of one’s sense of smell. Mine arrived, as these things tend to do, while scrolling through the usual digital slurry and encountering the latest pronouncement from Diane Abbott. The Russian threat, she declared with the serene confidence of someone who once calculated the annual salary of a policeman at roughly the price of a decent sandwich, is a “Nato fiction.” The war in Ukraine, she has elsewhere observed, amounts to little more than a Nato campaign against Russia. And here I sit, a man who has spent decades regarding Ms Abbott’s public utterances with the same wary fascination one reserves for a distant relative who insists on demonstrating card tricks after three glasses of wine, forced to murmur, against every instinct of self-preservation: she may, on this particular point, be onto something.
Let us first pay proper respects to the long and distinguished record that makes any such agreement feel like an act of intellectual self-harm. Diane Abbott has, over the years, perfected the art of the political stumble with a consistency that borders on the athletic. There was the immortal 2017 radio performance in which the cost of recruiting ten thousand extra police officers floated freely between three hundred thousand pounds—thirty quid a head, if one is feeling generous—and eighty million, a figure that would still have left each officer roughly on the financial footing of a Victorian chimney sweep. One half expected her to revise it further downward until the entire force could be paid in bus tickets and kind words. Then there was the serene suggestion that Chairman Mao had, on balance, done more good than harm, a claim delivered with the air of someone reviewing a particularly ambitious restaurant rather than a regime whose body count would have given even the more industrious twentieth-century monsters pause.
Add the taxi tweet, the Finnish nurses who had apparently never met a black person and were therefore unsuitable for multicultural Hackney, the private-school decision for her own son after years of denouncing such choices as indefensible hypocrisy, the mojito on the Overground (a moment of pure proletarian solidarity with the tinny), the mismatched shoes on election day, and the letter in which Jewish, Irish and Traveller experiences of prejudice were briskly filed under the same heading as the tribulations of redheads. One could almost admire the range. Most politicians specialise in one or two reliable howlers; Abbott treats the entire spectrum as her personal playground.
And then, of course, there is the romance. In the late 1970s, while the rest of Britain was discovering the joys of inflation and punk, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn embarked upon what can only be described as the least erotic political liaison since John Major decided he rather fancied a late night Currie. She has herself recounted how their great romantic outing consisted of a drive to Highgate Cemetery so that Jeremy might proudly display the tomb of Karl Marx. One pictures the scene: a young woman dressed for what she fondly imagined might be a wine bar, only to find herself standing in the drizzle before a monument to dialectical materialism while her suitor beamed as if he had just presented her with the Koh-i-Noor. There was, apparently, a motorbike tour of East Germany as well—because nothing says passion like the German Democratic Republic in winter. The relationship, she notes, eventually collapsed under the weight of Jeremy’s discovery that politics occupied ninety-nine per cent of his available attention, leaving her the unenviable one per cent. One struggles to imagine the domestic conversation. “Darling, shall we go out?” “Yes—Highgate, and bring a notebook.” It is the sort of courtship that makes one grateful for the invention of the dating app, if only so that future generations might be spared such ideological package holidays.
All of which brings us, by a route as circuitous and poorly signposted as one of Abbott’s own statistical explanations, to the present discomfort. For years I have watched the Ukrainian conflict with the growing suspicion that the official narrative has acquired the same self-sealing quality once reserved for certain theological disputes. Nato’s eastward expansion, the broken assurances of the 1990s, the transformation of a brutal regional war into a quasi-existential crusade complete with moral blackmail and escalating weaponry. Abbott’s formulation is characteristically blunt and lacking in diplomatic polish; she has never been accused of excessive nuance. Yet the insistence that every expression of caution about endless escalation, about the wisdom of treating a nuclear-armed power as a cartoon villain, or about the domestic cost of perpetual rearmament constitutes “Kremlin talking points” that somehow synchronises perfectly with American electoral cycles and presidential preferences, a certain scepticism is not only permissible but obligatory.
I do not suggest for one moment that Vladimir Putin is a misunderstood agrarian reformer, nor that the corpses in Bucha and Mariupol are optical illusions. Reality is under no obligation to be tidy. But the spectacle of Western capitals discovering, rather late in the day, that Russia constitutes an existential menace precisely when budgets need inflating and political capital needs harvesting, has a familiar odour. Abbott, for all her habitual clumsiness, has simply refused to pretend that the emperor’s new strategic concept is anything other than a rather threadbare set of underpants. In doing so she has, against the odds and against her own considerable body of previous work, momentarily aligned herself with the awkward, unfashionable observation that great-power rivalries are rarely as pure as the press releases claim.
It is a deeply unsettling sensation. Agreeing with Diane Abbott feels rather like discovering that the relative who cannot count change has correctly predicted the winner of the Grand National by studying the horses’ names for Star Trek references. One wants to check the calculation three times, then four. Yet here we are. The woman who once reduced police recruitment to the price of a takeaway coffee has, on the matter of Nato’s Ukrainian entanglement and the convenient inflation of the Russian peril, managed to sound more lucid than half the commentariat currently demanding that we all dig deeper for the next tranche of munitions.
The universe, as I say, has a sense of humour. It is not always a kind one, and it rarely bothers with punchlines that flatter the listener. Still, one must occasionally tip one’s hat to the absurd. Even if the hat in question was last seen on the wrong foot.