The race in review: Diane Abbott

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

There are many ways to describe Diane Abbott’s leadership campaign so far. It has been a combination of plucky, threadbare, underfunded, over-achieving and muddled. Diane Abbott has by far the fewest staff (at the last count it’s an entirely volunteer run affair), with a budget that currently stands at around 1% of the budget held by one of her competitors. Yet she’s still in the race, and despite having almost all of the organisational disadvantages, there’s unlikely to be much daylight between her final performance and that of the better funded Balls and Burnham.

She has name recognition amongst “ordinary voters” that most of her (former cabinet member) competitors would kill for. Her stock in trade is a comfortable banter that eludes most politicians. She’s great for a soundbite – especially during these quiet summer weeks when the 24 hour news stations (and let’s be honest, political blogs) are crying out for good copy.

And yet..it’s hard not to think that Diane could and should still have run a better campaign than this.

Sure, she’s short of cash, but a serious leadership candidate should be able to raise much more than £5,000 with a list of email addresses, a rudimentary website and a paypal account.

Sure, she lacks the organisational capacity to win big union nominations, but she’s supposed to have the policies that trade unions are crying out for – yet she wasn’t even seriously in the running for the GMB, Unite, Unison or CWU nominations.

In many ways it’s harder to write about the “Abbott campaign” in the way you would for any of the other candidates. Diane’s campaign doesn’t have an office or staff. I doubt it has a complex media grid or a means of mobilising CLP support and tracking nominations. It is therefore impossible and unfair to grade her campaign on the same scale or by the same standards as her opponents. Yet I think it says something about Diane, that this small campaign still gains the attention that it does due in no small part to the force of her own personality.

Diane will still do well. I’d expect her to perform well in both the members section and the trade union section (particularly in the latter due to name recognition). Out of this race there is a fair chance (depending on how the next shadow cabinet is elected) that Diane will have transformed herself from a maverick back bencher with no prospect of a front bench career into a Clare Short figure for this decade.

Diane is still in this race, not because she has a realistic chance of winning – her hemorrhaging of support in the MPs section to one Miliband or the other has ruled out any serious chance of that. But there’s a career out there for Diane if she wants it, and it needn’t be on a comfy sofa with Portillo anymore.

This is the second in a series of posts looking at how the leadership candidates, and their campaigns, have performed so far. They’re being done in alphabetical order, so tomorrow’s article will feature the Ed Balls campaign. You can read the first post on the leadership race for the party as a whole here.