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POLITICAL ROW: Diane Abbott, Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo

AS LONG as This Week has been part of the BBC menu on a Thursday evening, I have positioned myself on the sofa in order to join Michael Portillo and Diane Abbott as they discussed political events.

Presenter Andrew Neil did not matter. He has for some time now been a fifth-rate presenter, way behind the likes of Jeremy Paxman, Sky’s Adam Boulton, Channel Four’s Jon Snow and so many others.

Abbott and Portillo were sufficient, sitting next to each other as though they were fellow students in a common room at university. The ease of communication between them negated any possibility of a gladiatorial contest normally seen between politicians on different TV programmes.

I spoke with Diane Abbott casually only a few weeks ago at a book festival in Stoke Newington, north London, where she is a sitting MP.

I told her that I looked forward to the programme weekly. And that the chemistry between her and Portillo has a lot to do with the fact that they are both children of immigrants with a unique way of seeing issues. Fact is, they attended the same secondary school and that helps.

I speak of the programme now in the past tense because I have switched off for good. I have no interest whatsoever in boring conversations between Portillo and Hazel Blears, Carol Flint and Andy Burnham.

Neil wrecked the programme – there can be no reconciliation with Diane after he spewed so much bile all over her a couple of weeks ago.

Abbott, throughout her campaign for the leadership of the Labour party, had to face the question as to why, left-winger as she is, she sent her son to private school. No mention that he went on to an international school in Ghana to complete his pre-university education. Ghana is the land of Kwame Nkrumah, a huge figure in the anti-colonial movement which chased the British out of Africa.

Abbott reasoned when challenged about her son’s education by Neil that West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children. Neil asked: “So black mums love their kids more than white mums do they?”

He repeated this inane question several times. And there is more to come from Neil. “Supposing Michael Portillo said ‘white mums will go to the wall for their children’, isn’t that a racial remark?” Neil smirked as he went into overdrive.

A simple fact escaped him. Diane did not mention the words ‘black mums’ at all. She said, ‘West Indian mums’. A presenter of a mainstream programme should know West Indian mums are made up of all races. Black, Indian, Chinese, white, and much else – all of whom were socialised and brutalised on the Caribbean sugar plantations under the yoke of slavery and later brutally imposed colonialism.

Neil found himself trapped in monumental ignorance about those of us who migrated to the UK from the Caribbean.

Abbott is absolutely right in her reference to Caribbean women. The only way out of the sugar plantations from which thousands of us died through disease and physical brutality is due to education. No inheritance of stocks and shares.

I wish Diane Abbott’s son well. Neil is but an empty vessel manufacturing noises of the uncivilised. This Week won’t last without Abbott and Portillo on the sofa.

Published: 12 July 2010
Issue: 0

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