Euan McColm: Frank Hester race row and treatment of Diane Abbott are new lows in a grim political era

Conservative’s attempts to defend Frank Hester comments and refusal to give up his £10m donation show just how money influences politics, writes Euan McColm

What an absolutely miserable week it’s been for anyone concerned about standards in political life.

When it was reported last Monday that leading Conservative Party donor, Frank Hester, had made horrifically racist remarks about the Black MP Diane Abbott, it seemed the only response was obvious. The party should have immediately distanced itself from him and handed back the £10million he’d donated.

Instead, as we’ve come to expect from the shambolic, morally bankrupt Tory party, the first instinct was to play things down.

Conservative Party donor Frank Hester OBE

Let’s be crystal clear: what Hester, who made his fortune in the field of healthcare technology, was alleged to have said about Abbott was racist. He was reported as saying: “It's like trying not to be racist but you see Diane Abbott on the TV, and you're just like I hate, you just want to hate all black women because she's there, and I don't hate all black women at all, but I think she should be shot.”

The tycoon later apologised for making “rude” comments about Abbott – who sits as an independent MP after losing the Labour whip after writing a letter that appeared to downplay the prejudice experience by Jewish people to the Observer newspaper last April – but insisted his remarks “had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin”.

Your view of that explanation will depend on your tolerance for absolute bullshit.

Nevertheless, it was enough for a string of Tory MPs, who spent much of last Tuesday insisting Hester’s remarks were not racist.

Take energy minister Graham Stuart who said he would “hesitate” to describe Hester’s words as racist. Following Stuart’s public humiliation, Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, was next to step forward. Stride said that while Hester’s remarks had been “inappropriate”, they were not “gender-based or race-based”.

The delivery of that line required superhuman levels of brass neck. Remember, it’s reported Hester said seeing Diane Abbott made him want to hate all black women. How it’s possible to argue such remarks are not gender and race based, I’m just not sure.

Of course, the party line – because the party line was clearly nonsense – could not survive for long. On Tuesday afternoon, equalities minister Kemi Badenoch - the most high profile black woman on the Tory frontbench, tweeted: “Hester’s 2019 comments, as reported, were racist. I welcome his apology.”

Suddenly, the party line changed, too. “Oh, did we say his remarks weren’t racist? What we meant was they were massively racist…”

There are 10 million reasons why the Tory Party was, initially, resistant to demands for Hester’s remarks to be condemned as racist. Soon after the donor’s comments about Abbott were made public, opposition parties began to demand the Tories hand back his donation. But 10 million quid is a lot of money for any political party to turn down, so of course the Conservatives wished to avoid that course.

Even when the party line had changed and senior figures, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, had begun to publicly condemn Hester’s reported remarks as, you know, actually racist, after all, the Tories continued to resist calls to hand the money back. Hester had apologised and that was an end to the matter.

Except it wasn’t. Shortly after Sunak had taken a pounding over the issue at Prime Minister’s Question Time on Wednesday, the Scottish Tories issued a statement reading: “The Scottish Conservative party has never accepted a donation from Frank Hester and the UK Conservative party should carefully review the donations it has received from Hester in response to his remarks.”

On top of that, other senior Tories, including the former party Chair Chris Patten, the West Midlands mayor, Andy Street, and the former minister Alistair Burt, began demanding the party give back the cash.

What we witnessed in all its bleakness was the way in which money influences our politics. Had Frank Hester been some nonentity local councillor in Slough, he’d have been thrown out of the Tory Party amid a wave of condemnation for his racism the very moment his remarks had been made public. Instead, he’s a cash cow and the first instinct of Conservative MPs was to protect the donations he’d made and, if possible, to ensure he would give again.

The other significant aspect to this grubby tale is the appalling treatment of Diane Abbott.

It is, it should not need saying, possible to disagree with Abbott’s politics, even to believe Sir Keir Starmer was correct to remove from her the Labour whip, and also to think she deserves to be treated with respect.

Shame on anyone who can shrug off Abbott’s response to Hester’s remarks in which she said she found the situation “frightening”.

“I am a single woman,” said Abbott, “and that makes me vulnerable anyway. But to hear someone talking like this is worrying. The fact that two MPs have been murdered in recent years makes talk like this all the more alarming.”

We cannot combat a culture in which black women feel – and, indeed, are – especially vulnerable by refusing to accept that the sort of thing Frank Hester is reported to have said is nakedly racist.

On Wednesday, we saw the House of Commons at its worst on this matter. During Prime Minister’s Question Time, Abbott stood 46 times hoping to be called by Speaker Lindsay Hoyle. Despite the fact other MPs were discussing her situation during the session, Abbott wasn’t given the chance to speak.

Later, a spokesperson for Hoyle said this had been because there hadn’t been time.

Hoyle runs the show. He could – and should – have made time and if that meant another MP losing out on the chance to talk, hey ho. No MP would have criticised the Speaker.

The Tories’ attempts to defend Hester’s reported remarks and the Speaker’s failure to let Diane Abbott address parliament mark new lows in this grim political era.