BBC News profiles the candidates: Diane Abbott

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Diane Abbott was the fifth and final leadership candidate to be profiled by the BBC today. In by far the most contentious interview of this series, Diane accused her rivals of being ‘up to their necks’ in the bitter feuds of New Labour, and described her four rivals as ‘geeky young men in suits’ . Diane is also critical of Ed Balls, saying that if he didn’t brief against Blair then it must have been his ‘evil twin brother’.

Perhaps most cuttingly, Abbott accuses the other candidates of “pretending they weren’t there” when it comes to decisions of the previous government:

“You wouldn’t believe to hear them that they were at the heart of the new Labour project for at least a decade, 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, and all this hand-wringing and pretending they weren’t there, that they weren’t at the heart of the project, is slightly, ….amazing.”

Abbott says that the political class doesn’t look like Britain, and that Labour has become to distant:

“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 cast apart, a strange sort of geeky young men in suits. It really does matter, we have to have a political class that looks like Britain, that an ordinary person can imagine themselves being involved in, and wonderful as all my colleagues are, its difficult for ordinary people to imagine themselves involved in what they’ve been involved in.”

Yet she denies that she should move the party to the left:

“I’m not talking about moving the Party to the left, I’m talking about moving the Party to where ordinary Labour supporters are, and ordinary Labour supporters are in a place where they want to see a party which they think is speaking for them and not the very wealthy.”