Diane Abbott will be reselected to fight her seat at a meeting of the Labour party’s executive on Tuesday despite having suggested on social media that Keir Starmer was a liar, the Guardian understands.
Abbott will be on the list of 650 candidates picked to fight the general election that is rubber-stamped by the national executive committee (NEC), sources said.
Starmer said last week that Abbott was “free to stand” as a Labour candidate, after days of speculation that she could be blocked.
Abbott said on Sunday that she intended to “run and win” for Labour in Hackney North and Stoke Newington, and denied a report that she had been offered a seat in the House of Lords if she agreed to stand aside in the constituency she has represented for 37 years.
She then apparently tweeted a link to an article by the Starmer biographer Tom Baldwin headlined “Starmer on Abbott: ‘I’ve actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises”, with the words: “More lies from Starmer.” She deleted the post shortly afterwards.
Labour officials confirmed they would in effect ignore the post and press ahead with her reselection on Tuesday. A party source said: “It will hopefully be a very short and uneventful NEC meeting. We need to put this behind us.”
Senior Labour figures are concerned that the row over Abbott, and what critics have described as a purge of leftwing candidates, has the potential to undermine the party’s message that it has changed since the days of factional infighting under Jeremy Corbyn.
Labour has attacked the Conservatives over the last few years of chaos and division and has suggested that a Starmer-led government would be more focused on delivering in the interests of the public.
“Keir has said that Diane is free to stand and that’s that,” said one party insider. “We want to get through the NEC meeting and concentrate on the stuff that voters really care about. Suggestions of internal splits don’t help with that”.
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The Guardian understands that Apsana Begum is also on the list of party candidates to be nodded through by the NEC despite speculation that she could be blocked.
Local party sources in her constituency of Poplar and Limehouse in east London suggested there had been conversations around whether to parachute in another candidate, but that Labour headquarters had been concerned about the fallout if they deselected another minority ethnic woman.
Source: theguardian.com
