Diane Abbott

God help me keep my mouth shut
It now gets interesting. The ballot for the Labour party leadership race has closed. It is assumed a Miliband will win and some excited people have already suggested they know the outcome and declared in favour of the elder. Also assumed is that the new leader will embark on a period of modernisation. A safe bet there as they all do that! So how do the bookies read this contest ? Well, the elder Miliband is the favourite but at 150/1 is Diane Abbott. And as all the other candidates are boring white men let's do a little positive discrimination and focus on Abbott.

This might seem to miss the point but remember it was Greg Dyke in 2001 when working as Director General of the BBC who described the corporation as "hideously white". The BBC pays Abbott a huge sum of money for her 'work', some say £36,000 a year for her slot on Andrew Neil's The Daily Politics show, which began in 2003. Whilst she is not the bookies' favourite, she rings all the bells at the BBC.

Nulabour, ready to go
Have you ever had such laugh? The battle for the leadership of Nulabour, can it get any worse? Not so long ago Nulabour had convinced itself, and crucially, the Westminster village, that it was the finest political machine ever made. Now it looks, and performs, like a rusty wreck, if it were a car it would be traded in for a new model. Just as the Peter Mandelson scheme for trading old cars for new was supposed to help UK industry, but did not, the point of the leadership battle , it's hardly a beauty contest, was to stimulate the party, to make it better and renew it, but it won't. And we have none other than Polly Toynbee to tell us it's all gone wrong. But should we take her word for it? As in her case not so long ago she sang the praises of Nulabour, in its entirety, for all to hear. But now it's different, Toynbee calls the likes of Blair and Mandelson "yesteryear headline addicts". This is hard to take seriously from Toynbee, or her newspaper.

The future?
Well hidden, deep in a desert of South Western USA is the Boneyard. This is a ghostly place where the US military stores its unwanted aircraft see HERE. By contrast the political scrapyard in which Nulabour waits to be recycled is, for those who want to see it, in full view. Although it would be wrong to say we are all agog, as most of us are not. Put simply Nulabour has slipped off the nation's radar, this is a geeks only story. Even so it's very interesting (how sad!).

On again!
When Michael Portillo left parliament in 2005 he went full time into the media. I have an awful feeling that's what will happen to Lembit Opik who lost his seat recently. Failed politicians with no sense of shame tend to flourish in the media. I say tend to, there are exceptions, Neil Kinnock springs to mind. He was on after the Nulabour General Election meltdown doing the rounds, one studio after another, explaining something, I'm not sure what though and doing it badly as is the Kinnock way. But I still think the general drift here holds true. Just imagine Portillo gets influenza or gets stuck the other side of the world due to some volcanic ash cloud, how's Diane Lardybott going to cope with sitting next to Opik on the Daily Politics Show sofa, or for that matter Andrew Neil? The BBC has fallen in love with the LibDems so an ex-LibDem MP with a working knowledge of asteroids, well what could be better, or worse?

Rod Liddle and Diane Abbott, they 'don't get on'. Mind you the BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme was once edited by Liddle and was as bad way back then as it is now. Abbott is, it would seem, employed by the BBC for the same reason it employs many people, they think she is entertaining. Dear old beeb, wrong again! She is horribly grating in manner and a talent-free zone. However, of the two I would side with Liddle, he can be funny.

Writing for the Spectator Liddle has made poking fun at Abbott a regular feature, his latest effort HERE is both hilarious and shocking. A school in Hackney, Abbott's constituency, has a stupid white man (SWM) as a headmaster of one of its schools. This we can see for ourselves as he has got himself and some of his pupils on YouTube performing a rap song about a famous black person (FBP).