Diane Abbott on her standoff with Labour: ‘It was a question of who blinked first. And they did’

The way Abbott tells it, for several months going back to last year, she came under significant pressure to do a deal with the Labour leadership to stand down after she had the Labour whip removed for writing an appalling letter to the Observer which, among other things, compared being Jewish, a Traveller or Irish to having red hair. “The deal was that they would restore the whip and then literally that day, within hours, I would stand down,” she says. “Not the same week. The same day. And then maybe I could go to the Lords.”