Diane Abbott confirms she will run as Labour candidate in general election
Diane Abbott has said she “intends to run and win” as Labour’s candidate in Hackney North and Stoke Newington following speculation she may choose to stand down.
Ms Abbott, who was this week told she would be allowed to stand for Labour after months of uncertainty, also denied she had been offered a seat in the House of Lords in the event she chose to retire.
In a post on social media, Ms Abbott said: “I have never been offered a seat in the Lords, and would not accept one if offered.
“I am the adopted Labour candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. I intend to run and to win as Labour’s candidate.”
There have been questions over Ms Abbott’s future in the Labour Party ever since was suspended from the party last year for suggesting that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experience prejudice rather than racism.
The comments, which she apologised for, sparked a long-running process which saw her sit as an Independent MP.
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Ms Abbott, the UK’s first female black MP, finally had the party whip restored earlier this week, theoretically paving the way for her to stand for Labour at the election.
However, her future appeared in doubt as some papers were briefed that she had been barred from standing for the party again.
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As a backlash against Ms Abbott’s exclusion gained momentum, Sir Keir Starmer initially said “no decision” had been taken regarding her future – before later going on to confirm that she would be “free” to stand for the party in the seat she has held for nearly 40 years.
His decision meant Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee, was set to approve Ms Abbott’s candidacy at a crunch meeting on Tuesday.
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Diane Abbott will run for Labour
But there have been growing rumours that, having been given the green light to stand for Labour, Ms Abbott was considering quitting politics altogether.
It was then reported in the Sunday Times that the veteran leftwinger was among a number of former Labour MPs who had been offered peerages in exchange for standing down to make way for Sir Keir’s allies in plum seats – something Ms Abbott has now denied had happened.
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Yvette Cooper, Labour’s shadow home secretary, also rejected the claim this morning, telling Sky News’s Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips: “No party can do that, it’s not the way the system works.”
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She said there was a “whole process” for an independent committee to vet nominations to the Lords so it was not possible for Sir Keir, or any party leader, to promise anybody a seat.
The allegation came after Ms Abbott accused Sir Keir of “culling” Labour left-wingers after two potential candidates, Faiza Shaheen and Lloyd Russell-Moyle, were blocked from standing in Chingford and Woodford Green and Brighton Kemptown, respectively.
Former leader Jeremy Corbyn – who will now stand as an independent in the constituency of Islington North – also told Sky News Sir Keir was “clearly intervening” in a “purge” of left-wing candidates.
The Labour leader has denied blocking the left, saying his party had “fantastic candidates across the country” and he wanted the “highest quality candidates on the pitch for the task ahead”.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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