Diane Abbott, defender of Chairman Mao, is new shadow home secretary
Every time you think it cannot get any worse with Jeremy Corbyn it does. In his latest reshuffle he has not only fired the party’s defence spokesman, Clive Lewis, because Lewis made the case for pro-Trident official Labour policy at the recent conference in Liverpool. Corbyn has done something even worse than that. He has made Diane Abbott shadow home secretary.
Diane Abbott. Diane Abbott. Shadow home secretary. Diane Abbott. There are no words, other than these she offered in defence of Chairman Mao on the BBC This Week programme in 2008 when Abbott was a regular pundit. To the astonishment of host Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo, in the clip she made the case for Mao the mass murdering maniac.
Diane Abbott is now the shadow home secretary. That distant sound of laughter, intercut with some wailing from sensible Labour people, you can hear across Westminster and Whitehall is down to Tory MPs, MI5 and the media laughing their heads off. It is as though Corbyn is worried the Tories still require more material for their attack adverts to run at the next general election. There are three and a half years to go, and already the Tories have enough material for an anti-Corbyn box set.