Diane Abbott’s privately-educated son, 28, is charged with 11 new offences

Diane Abbott’s son was in court yesterday after being charged with a string of violent offences including allegedly beating up police, emergency workers and doctors as well as exposing himself in a hospital.

James Abbott-Thompson appeared before a judge at Thames Magistrates Court where he was accused of 11 crimes – most of them on NHS property.

He is alleged to have gone on the rampage attacking nine people including five emergency workers, two of whom were assaulted on the same day. 

The 28-year-old faces nine charges of assault, a charge of of racially aggravated criminal damage and one of exposure over the past five months.

George Gross, defending, said: ‘The defendant proposes to indicate not guilty pleas.’ 

Miss Abbott, who has been Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Home Secretary since 2016, was not in court yesterday. 

Abbott-Thompson is the only son of the Labour MP and Ghanaian architect Richard Thompson, who divorced a year after his birth following two years of marriage.

James Abbott-Thompson (left on Parliament’s Thames terrace), the son of Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, has been charged with 11 new offences after appearing in court last month charged with three others

The 11 charges faced by Diane Abbott’s son 

Abbott-Thompson studied at Cambridge before getting a job at the Foreign Office

· Assaulted a person causing them actual bodily harm – August 7, 2019 – Royal Free Hospital 

· Assault by beating – August 8, 2019 – Mile End Hospital – assaulted a Doctor

· Assault by beating of emergency services worker – July 26, 2019 – Homerton Hospital – assaulted a police officer

· Assault by beating of emergency services worker – July 26, 2019 – on Middleton Road – assaulted a police officer

· Assaulted a person causing them actual bodily harm – July 26, 2019 – within the London borough of Hackney 

· Exposure – October 27, 2019 – at Homerton Hospital

· Assault by beating of emergency services worker – November 7, 2019 – at Homerton Hospital – assaulted a nurse

· Racially/religiously aggravated criminal damage – November 7, 2019, at Homerton Hospital – destroyed prescription spectacles

· Assault by beating of emergency services worker – November 8, 2019 – Homerton Hospital – assaulted a police officer

· Assault by beating – August 7, 2019 – Royal Free Hospital – 

· Assault by beating of an emergency services worker – December 23, 2019 – Bevan Ward, Homerton Hospital – assaulted a social therapist

The alleged attacks took place over the last six months at three London hospitals, the Homerton Hospital in Hackney, the Royal Free in Hampstead and Mile End Hospital in Tower Hamlets.

The last assault on a hospital worker is said to have taken place just two days before Christmas. 

He also faces one count of exposure on a hospital ward. 

Yesterday the Cambridge graduate appeared at Thames Magistrates Court in Bromley-by-Bow. 

District Judge Jane McIvor granted Abbott-Thompson bail yesterday ahead of a further hearing at Wood Green Crown Court next month.   

The former diplomat left the Foreign Office in June this year just weeks before the first alleged attack on July 26 when he is accused of carrying out three attacks including two on emergency workers outside Homerton Hospital and elsewhere in Hackney where his mother lives.

Abbott-Thompson had formerly enjoyed a meteoric rise within the Foreign Office after joining Diplomatic Fast Stream in 2014.

After two and a half years in London, he was stationed in the British Embassy in Rome and was appointed as the First Secretary for Exiting the EU.

At the age of just 27 he was working alongside the British Ambassador in Italy advising the British Consul and representatives of the British community in Italy about their rights post Brexit.

The mother of one made headlines when she decided to send her only child to the private City of London School in 2003 after criticising colleagues for choosing selective and independent schools.

She was accused of hypocrisy, but claimed she had done a lot of work on ‘how black boys underachieve in secondary schools’. 

Ms Abbott spoke about her son during a TV interview when she was running for the Labour leadership in 2010.

Explaining her decisions about his education, she said: ‘I knew what could happen if my son went to the wrong school and got in with the wrong crowd.

‘They are subjected to peer pressure and when that happens it’s very hard for a mother to save her son. Once a black boy is lost to the world of gangs it’s very hard to get them back.’

She told the BBC’s Andrew Neil: ‘West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.’

Ms Abbott made Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative cabinet minister who served a prison sentence for perjury, her son’s godfather, after she worked with him at Thames Television in the 1980s.