Few British politicians can give as cringeworthy a media performance as Diane Abbott. Speaking to presenter Nick Ferrari on the radio station LBC, Abbott has once again demonstrated her near-total incapacity for professional politics.
Launching Labour’s plan for 10,000 extra police officers, the woman who would be Home Secretary seemed to be trying to make her policy up as she went along. Abbott claimed that the officers would cost only £300,000, or £30 each. After the disastrous interview, Jeremy Corbyn was forced to confirm that the policy would cost £300million. Abbott has criticised the media and claimed that her trainwreck interview was a case of misspeaking, and that the performance somehow reduced the credibility of the media itself. In attacking the media for her inability to answer even basic questions about her own policy, Abbott has betrayed her lack of quality.
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Diane Abbott is one of Labour’s most over-promoted and under-qualified politicians whose rise to prominence has come in great part due to her loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn. Replacing Andy Burnham in the shadow home secretary brief, she returned to Labour’s front line after a patchy career in which she has criticised her Labour colleagues for how they choose to educate their children (before sending her own child to a public school), and in which she has made daft generalisations about “white people” on social media.
Diane Abbott has known Jeremy Corbyn for a long time, and even had a brief relationship with him when he was a councillor in north London in the late Seventies, but Corbyn needs to ditch her as a political ally, and promote Labour politicians with a sufficient grasp of their brief.
Her achievement as the first black woman elected to parliament should not be overlooked, but the former press officer has had an otherwise unremarkable political career, punctuated by minor scandals like her 2009 expenses claim of £142,000 which featured £1,100 spent on taxis, and the vast sums of money she has banked from appearing as a BBC political pundit. The shamelessness with which Abbott defended her disastrous interview (and then denied not knowing the basic details of her own policy) betray the high-handedness of a politician who has sat on a large majority for almost three decades, and who is bosom buddies with her boss.
When my co-writer and I wrote “Corbyn The Musical” to dramatise Jeremy’s romantic fling with Diane Abbott we thought we had picked the most amusing moment in their lives, but Abbott’s wobbly turn on LBC shows that the real-life dramas of the Jeremy and Diane show may be funnier still. Corbyn has defended Abbott, insisting that he is not embarrassed by his shadow home secretary, but he should be.
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Diane Abbott should not have accepted the job if she didn’t think she was up to running one of the largest and most demanding departments in government. In the middle of a short general election campaign, it is inexcusably incompetent for a member of parliament with pretensions to become the Home Secretary to have such a poor grasp of her facts. These were not tricky, “gotcha” questions, they were the nuts and bolts of her party’s plan for government. Diane Abbott’s day hasn’t just been a car-crash, it’s revealed a level of incompetence in the Labour party to contend with the organising minds behind the Fyre Festival.
