One Diane Is One Too Many

I'm a big supporter of having a more diverse PLP, and particularly of improving on the current derisory number of BME women MPs. However, I'm not sure that Jackie Ashley's call for Parliament to have more Diane Abbotts will aid the cause of BME women's representation. Well, at least not for Labour.

Jackie tells a fascinating story about Diane. Recounting their days "working" together at TV-am, she recalls: "Well, I was working. Abbott swiftly became our NUJ representative and developed an uncanny skill at scheduling union meetings so that she was sadly unable to do the much-hated night shift. And, highlighting Diane's passionate dedication to the Labour Party, she recounts: "She struck up a friendship with one of the company founders, Jonathan Aitken, and they later paired with each other in the Commons, when she became a Labour MP and he was a Conservative." Their divergent political careers comes across almost as accidental, but never so much as to endanger a close personal relationship.

Going on to the topic of personal relationships, Jackie Ashley writes of Diane: "She was, and is, a cheerer-upper. She was never the cautious, quietly hard-working type. In an early interview she cheerfully announced that her happiest experience was making love in a cornfield with a certain well-known television executive. That raised more than a few eyebrows on the Labour benches." As indeed did her enduring and ongoing public relationship with yet another famous Conservative, Michael Portillo. But Diane raised no eyebrows quite as much as when this proselytizing left-wing advocate of comprehensive education decided to send her son James to the exclusive City of London School.

So, there's no arguing that Diane has a unique set of qualities as a politician - but they are her personal qualities, not ones that should apply to a Labour parliamentary candidate, let alone a Labour M.P. We need ethnic minority women MPs from all wings of the Labour Party. We particularly need BME women MPs with an approach to politics that, in contrast to Diane's self-created role as the perpetual outsider and oppositionalist, will see them become Whips and Ministers and involved in creating policy, not protesting about it. What we don't need, however, is black women exploiting their position to write populist vote-winning "poor black" trash in The Voice while displaying her white middle class piano playing credentials to a quite different audience on TV.

There's not much to credit Diane Abbott with. She lives in Hackney's "millionaires row" - Middleton Road in London Fields - and supports left wing loonies John McDonnell and Jon Cruddas for Leader and Deputy Leader. Meanwhile, decent hardworking right-wing Brown and Blears supporters such as Linda and I have to scrape by, raising a family in a small flat off Stoke Newington Road. There's something awfully not right there somewhere. I wish I could work out how she did it. So I could do the same.