A while ago, back in December 2019 to be precise, this blog covered the story of Labour MP Diane Abbott’s son who was arrested for among other things, biting a police officer. James Abbott-Thompson was remanded in a mental hospital for assessment following a six month binge on Methamphetimine that appears to have completely wrecked Mr Abbott-Thompsons life and his career in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
I realised that the offences that Abbott-Thompson was accused of were very serious but it was only when this case came to court earlier this month that the full details the violent depravity of Abbott-Thompson’s actions came out into the light. According to a court report from the Daily Mail, James Abbott-Thompson was reported to the police by his mother after he allegedly chased her around her house armed with a pair of scissors whilst claiming that he had a firearm in his dressing gown pocket. He then sunk his teeth into an officer who was trying to detain him under the Mental Health Act.
The newspaper continued that after he was detained he want on to commit further violent offences. The Daily Mail said:
But on the day when police took Abbott-Thompson from the Labour MP’s home to nearby Homerton Hospital he attacked a second police officer and another man.
A few days later he beat up a doctor at Mile End Hospital, assaulted a female nurse at the Royal Free Hospital and hit out at another man.
He went on in October to expose himself at Homerton Hospital. And on November 7, he racially abused a nurse, assaulted her and smashed her glasses.
The next day he set upon another policeman. And on November 29 he assaulted two officers outside the Foreign Office, where he was employed until leaving that summer to do consultancy work.
Abbott-Thompson turned up unannounced and asked to see a member of staff he knew. But when told they were not present, he flew into a rage with workers who called the police when he refused to leave.
Abbott-Thompson punched and spat in the face of one officer and tried to hit a second, biting his left thumb.
He also made a number of threats, wrecked a glass plaque and assaulted a third man.
What gets me about this case is that Abbott-Thompson had been given every advantage in life that could have been given to him. He was sent to an independent school, thereby sparing him the culture of the racism of low expectations of Black Britons that has been created by the Left dominated teaching unions in State schools. He got a job in one of the Great Offices of State and seemed to be given an overseas posting quite swiftly, something his Cambridge University education would have helped him achieve. But he threw it all away because of his involvement with Meth.
Whilst I take the view that the Misuse of Drugs Acts have been a spectacular failure and that prohibition of things like Cannabis, Opiates and similar drugs has been as much a disaster as alcohol Prohibition was in the early 20th century United States, I cannot deny that Meth is nasty. Even though I take the libertarian view that people should be free to get high if they wish but should be responsible about getting high, Meth does seem to cause immense problems with the user’s mental health. Maybe the growth of Meth in the UK is down to the massive profits that can be made from producing and seling it. According to one source Meth sells for £200 per gramme as opposed to Cocaine and normal Amphetamine which are £40 and £5 per gramme respectively. But Meth is something that even I who has a libertarian view of what people can do with their bodies with regards recreational substances, would keep heavily restricted because of the very swift damage that it does to the individual who takes it.
James Abbott-Thompson had a choice. He could have told those who were offering him Meth at the start of his Meth downfall that he was not interested and ingest something else instead. But he didn’t. He took the Meth and in the space of six months went from man with a lot of promise to a burnt out mentally ravaged husk of a person.
It’s amazing to comprehend what James Abbott-Thompson has thrown away by his own foolish actions. It’s also interesting to speculate as to why Abbott-Thompson thought he could get away with not becoming addicted to a substance that has ruined the lives of many others? Did he think he was invincible or had his charmed life as a Cambridge scholar and a diplomat made him arrogant? Is there any connection between him being the child of a single parent and his downfall? After all, Abbott-Thompson has had to live with the tragedy of fatherlessness, an affliction that has befallen on far too many Britons of West Indian heritage. If that is the case the there’s a great irony that the son of an MP who has spoken out vociferously in the past about the rights of single mothers and the pressures on them, should go down a similar self destructive route as that taken by so many much less gifted and high achieving Black Britons whose families are also afflicted by fatherlessness. We may probably never know why James Abbott-Thompson didn’t say no to the Meth, but because he did not, he’s ruined his life and the lives of those who care for him.
James Abbott-Thompson may not have started out as a violent thug, but some flaw within his character from who knows where, sent him along the path to consume Meth and sadly for him he’s forever going to be known in the future as ‘that nutcase who bit police officers’. I hope this guy can rebuild his life but it may be impossible, he might have done too much damage to his brain to be able to do that.
Yet again a story of addiction and mental health. One of the reasons why people don’t voluntarily seek help for addiction is the belief that they can control what they take even though deep down they know they can’t. There needs to be more awareness about how much drink/drugs a person takes before it becomes a problem.
I feel sorry for Abbott Thompson because being mentally ill is the most scariest thing ever. Not only for the person who is ill, but for their loved ones as well. There is such a strong feeling of despair. Unfortunately it isn’t until crime has been committed that intervention takes place. That is why there needs to be more help centres for the mentally ill and their families to access. As a society we are getting better at reducing the stigma around mental illness but there is still a way to go. Hopefully Abbott Thompson will pull himself out of the dark hole he is in.
I commend you for trying to take a compassionate view of this episode. Meth addiction is horrible.
I do feel bound, however, as a former work colleague of Abbott-Thompson’s, to report that he had a nasty streak a mile wide before he became hooked on meth.
There’s probably complex reasons for his behaviour. But there is no excuse for the damage he has inflicted on his victims. Especially the health workers and police officers who he severely injured.
Dear Bob. Welcome to Fahrenheit211. Thank you for your kind commendation. As I said I’m libertarian on the subject of those who take drugs, but Meth is so nasty that it deserves to be restricted as much as possible. Thank you for the background info on him. There must have been something in his background that made him this way, maybe something about being fatherless perhaps? It appears that whatever demons that were inside Abbott-Thompson were amplified and made worse by Meth.
Please do not use Fatherless as an excuse as a problem to his violent actions against
people, the reason being that I was an absent father after my son was born, with the consent of the mother. Years past by & I was back in the UK, & I met up with my son’s mother.
We arranged to all meet up for a chin wig, after the meeting I complemented the mother
what a lovely, caring son she has managed to bring up by herself, I was very proud of them both. We see each other once a month & have a good natter over a meal.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment on this. Some single parents, as in your position do indeed do wonders and are to be commended for the job they do. I can certainly go along with the idea that a family with a bad or violent father might be better off without him. I’ve met plenty of single parent families who are in a better position than they would have been had the bad man that sired the children had stayed around. I don’t think I was using fatherlessness as an excuse for James Abbott-Thompson’s actions, I’m merely pointing out that it may be one factor among many for his decline to a position where he felt arrogant enough to say yes to a drug that destroys those who take it.
I can’t deny however that there is an epidemic of fatherlessness in Britain’s West Indian heritage community and during my lifetime from primary school onward, where nearly all the West Indian kids had two parents, I’ve seen fatherlessness become somewhat of the norm in this group in certain areas. Although I’m aware that correlation is not causation, I can’t help but be aware that as fatherlessness has increased among Britain’s West Indian heritage community, so has criminality and the phenomena of young men taking their behavioural cues from those involved in street culture. Maybe the lack of stable male presence in these young men’s lives leads them to look for role models elsewhere, but on the street they find the worst ones.
In the United States as the welfare system prioritised single mothers, so grew the number of single mothers. Working single mothers had less time to spend on their children and this allowed the children to take their cues from sources other than that from within the family. Welfare families in the African-American community also may not imbue a work ethic in the children thereby hampering their chances in a society like America where a person’s success is determined in large part by the effort they put into life. Regrettably there is also more poverty in African-American single parent families than there should be and the less stable family structure with the mother having a string of boyfriends being ersatz fathers cannot be good for the children.
As I said some single parents do a fabulous job but others not so. You and your offspring have been lucky, but there are a lot of children who are not.
Well thank you, and I think this price might have been the first I have read on this affair which isn’t filtered through grotesque partisan righteousness (as sadly, most political commentary is these days).
Nearly every comment I have read either takes this episode as either as proof of the inherent wickedness of Diane Abbott and the Labour left, or views the press reporting of it as a hatchet job by the evil right wing press.
On that note, as an adult James alone is responsible for his behaviour. Not his mother (or indeed his father).
And although I disagree with almost everything Diane Abbott says, I do feel bad for her. She seems to have always tried to do the best by her son, even when it has been to her disadvantage (she must have known that agreeing to send him to private school would undermine her political credibility, but she did it anyway).
And after all that what does he do? Attacks her in her own home.
Although I can be as polemical and partisan as the next man, I thought in this case some balance was required. I despise Dianne Abbott’s politics and her race-baiting but like you I agree that she did the correct thing by sending her child to a private school. If I was in her position with her money I certainly would not have sent my child to a Hackney state school I really would not. Not only would he have faced the racism of low expectations from Leftist teachers, but he also might have come into contact with and followed some pretty nasty people as a consequence.
Meth destroys people, someone of James Abbott-Thompson’s background and education should have known that, yet still he said yes to it. I completely agree with you that JA-T dug his own grave by his own decisions.
Like others I have stuck the proverbial boot into Dianne Abbott for her politics and her gaffes, but I’ve seen and heard a few things recently that makes me wonder whether Abbott is genuinely ill, maybe with some cognitive problem and that makes me uneasy with continuing to stick the boot in to her. She no longer occupies any position of influence or power either in Parliament or in the Labour Party and that to me is the main thing.