Keir Starmer “doesn’t have a feel” for the Labour Party or politics in general and his team lacks the skills to run the country, veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott has said. The Telegraph has more.
In an interview, the veteran Left-wing backbencher claimed that the team around the Prime Minister lacks the skills to run the country.
She also said that, while she had considered standing down before the election in July, briefings about her being banned from running by Labour had led her to conclude: “Bugger that.”
Ms. Abbott was suspended from the party in April last year after claiming that Jewish people did not experience racism “all their lives”, remarks she then withdrew and apologised for.
She sat as an independent MP for more than a year before Sir Keir restored the whip at the start of the campaign in May, saying she would be free to stand for Labour.
Speaking to the BBC’s Newsnight Extra, Ms. Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, in London, said: “One of the things people forget or never knew about Keir Starmer is that he was only a member of the Labour Party for a very short time before he became leader.”
Asked why that was relevant, she replied: “Because he doesn’t have a feel for the Labour Party and politics in general. People will say ‘he smashed all those Left-wingers’, but that’s the skill set of the people around him. Running the country, not so much.”
Questioned on how Sir Keir had fared during his first six months in Government, Ms. Abbott said: “We’re going to have to see how things work out. What I will say is I never thought I’d say a good word about Tony Blair. But one thing Tony Blair was good at was empathy – and Starmer isn’t so great at empathy.
“The people around him think they’re so clever because they won by a landslide. Actually his proportion of the vote, I think it’s 33%. His proportion of the vote is relatively small, and I think it would be a mistake to think ‘ooh, we won by a landslide, therefore we can get away with anything’. That’s not going to work.”
Ms. Abbott has been vocal in opposing a number of decisions by the Labour Government to date, including cuts to the winter fuel allowance and refusing to compensate Waspi women.
While she insisted it was “still exciting to have a Labour Government”, the 71 year-old – who has represented her constituency for 37 years– had a clear message for Sir Keir. Asked what her hopes were for 2025, she said: “I hope that Syria becomes a stable nation state, and I hope that the Labour Party stops making mistakes.”
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