After Rishi Sunak’s soggy start to his election campaign, Labour operatives have in one breath mused words to the effect of “what were they thinking”, then in the next acknowledged that, at some point on this campaign, Labour is going to have a wobble and will be judged on how they respond.
Day seven and a little tremor is being felt in the form of the mess around Diane Abbott.
She’s a politician with a national profile, the country’s first black woman MP, and is now consuming the headlines over whether or not the party apparatus is going to prevent her from standing in this election.
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It is, says Jess Phillips, not a fight Labour should be having at this point in the campaign, telling our Electoral Dysfunction podcast that she thinks the leadership should let Ms Abbott run in the seat of Hackney North and Islington, where she has been the MP for 37 years.
“Personally and politically, I think that they should probably just let Diane run in Hackney, it should be for her to decide,” says Jess.
“I just think it’s a fight not worth having at this stage and, not even anything to do with the merits of the particular case is that, you know, all the things remain true, that Diane Abbott was the first black woman ever elected. She has served that constituency.”
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It’s all become a bit of a mess – and an unwanted distraction in a campaign that has been run very slickly until Tuesday – when stories started to emerge that the investigation into Ms Abbott had concluded, but a decision on whether to restore the whip to her was still to be made.
Just to remind you, in April 2023 she was suspended from the Labour Party after saying Jewish, Irish and Traveller people do not face racism “all their lives”.
She apologised and withdrew those remarks, but was suspended as a Labour MP – until yesterday.
But as she had the whip restored, a story turned up in The Times saying the party leadership was going to bar her from standing on 4 July.
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This has caused a monumental row and dominated the campaign today. She told me on Thursday morning that The Times story was true, but said she didn’t want to comment further.
Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer said this afternoon that this wasn’t right, and no decision had been made. The final decision rests with Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), although in effect the leadership can surely say what it wants to happen if they want to.
All the while, none of us are following what Labour is trying to get across about the NHS because we are all talking about Diane Abbott.
It’s what Lynton Crosby, the Conservative election guru and a past serial election winner, would call a “barnacle on the boat” that needs scrapping off, and quickly so the party can get back on course.
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One senior Labour figure told me that the row was a “distraction” and an issue that “should have been dealt with ages ago”, given that senior frontbenchers have been asked about it for weeks.
“You’re not going to win every day, but this one just didn’t need to happen,” said one party source.
Another party source thinks, in a nod to Sir Keir’s self-confessed ruthlessness, that the leadership could really go ahead with blocking Ms Abbott.
“The local party are upset,” said one figure. “But at this stage of the general election cycle, they can just parachute a candidate in and there is nothing the local party can do.”
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Jess Phillips thinks in the end she will be given the choice, but Ruth Davidson’s hunch is that they will stop her from standing, take the short news cycle hit and get this left firebrand out of the party.
I’m inclined to agree with Jess: how does it look to give the whip back and then bar Ms Abbott from standing in her seat?
For some voters that might not just look ruthless, it might look unnecessarily mean for a woman who represents something more than just Hackney North and Stoke Newington in the minds of many people in the Labour movement and beyond.
