Abbott interview adds colour to Labour leadership race
By politics.co.uk staff
A colourful and angry interview with Labour hopeful Diane Abbott has brought alive a contest which was in danger of being ignored by the public.
Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, the Labour MP accused Ed Balls of lying and launched into a harsh critique of her opponents.
“We’re not going to be able to engage with society and, particularly, engage young people in politics, if they see the political class as a caste apart, a strange sort of geeky young men in suits,” she said.
The backbencher criticised her rivals – all former Cabinet secretaries – of distancing themselves from positions they had adopted in the past.
“You wouldn’t believe to hear them that they were at the heart of the New Labour project for at least a decade,” she said.
“Whether or not they were MPs or not, they were at the heart, they were working for one or the other of the two key people. They were members of Cabinet for five years. And yet, at hustings after hustings, they tell you they disagreed with this, they disagreed with that, they don’t know why we did this, they don’t know why we did that.
“All this handwringing and pretending they weren’t there, that they weren’t at the heart of the project, is slightly amazing.”
Ms Abbott cast doubt on Ed Ball’s emphatic assertion that he has not been briefing against Andy Burnham.
“Well, if Ed Balls says he wasn’t involved, he wasn’t involved, but it must have been his evil twin brother,” she said.
The outsider in the race is widely respected in parliament for her constituency casework but she struggled to secure enough nominations to appear in the race and is not expected to make a strong showing.
