Matthew Parris has narrated this article for you to listen to.
‘Tony Blair walks on water.’ Decades ago this statement led a Times photographer and me to the front door of the dismal Hackney North & Stoke Newington Labour party offices. It was 23 April 1997, and a fateful general election loomed. I was my newspaper’s 46-year-old political sketchwriter, and Labour’s local candidate was a 43-year-old MP called Diane Abbott. She had hit the headlines with her withering response to New Labour demands that she cease her unhelpful noises-off from stage-left and toe the line. There were Labour colleagues who could have attested without sarcasm to their leader’s amphibian powers. She was not one of them.
‘MPs are pack animals. They’ll see the fate of their colleague and run the other way’
We were destined to wait outside that office all day. Abbott never came out. Occasionally we thought we spotted her peering through an upstairs window.
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