Why I think Labour will let Diane Abbott run

Good morning. And then there was one: Labour’s ruling national executive committee has selected a host of candidates for safe London seats (and for the seat of Chingford and Woodford Green, a currently marginal seat that everyone in Labour expects to get redder and safer with time. Faiza Shaheen, who was blocked from standing for the seat, said she would challenge her deselection in the courts). Just one seat remains up in the air: Diane Abbott’s Hackney North and Stoke Newington constituency.

The first week of the short campaign (the period in which we are now) is always marked by Labour rows about selections and the use of the rule book to hammer internal opponents. But there are two big differences this time: for the first time since the Parliamentary Labour party took the whip from Nye Bevan, founder of the NHS, it involves a genuinely national figure. Abbott said the party barred her from running for Labour. Keir Starmer has insisted “no decision has been taken”, while Angela Rayner said yesterday she doesn’t see why Abbott can’t stand.

Second, the row is playing out in public in a way that previous ones haven’t, partly because of Abbott’s national profile, partly due to changes in the UK’s media ecosystem. Some thoughts on that below.

Decision to leave

How much of a problem is Labour’s selections row in parliament? History suggests the answer in the country as a whole is “not much of one”. In my long time observing Labour up close, this stage in an election campaign is always the subject of infighting about the sharp mechanisms on who gets to represent the party. Once the ruling national executive committee has voted on who stands where, the circus moves on and the bitter and ugly process is forgotten.

But history also suggests that the answer locally can be “quite a lot”.

Labour starts every short campaign with a row over its selections, for the reasons I described in yesterday’s email: the NEC has broad powers to shape who stands in this accelerated process, and members have pretty weak ones to replace MPs once they are installed. Therefore, filling retirement seats and the management of who gets the safe seats is a major way the party’s factions seek to dominate one another.

Two examples that provoked particular ill feeling at the time stand out in my memory: first, the 2001 selection of Shaun Woodward under Tony Blair, who defected from the Conservative party in 1999, in St Helens South. The second happened in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn. Sally Gimson, a Highgate councillor, had been picked by local members to stand in Bassetlaw. The NEC voted to disbar her and to hand the candidacy to Keir Morrison, her defeated rival. Just as with Faiza Shaheen, there were allegations against the candidate and threats of litigation.

2001 was a “managed” selection, in which local members were angry not to have a choice of a local candidate but were instead offered a choice between Woodward and Barbara Keeley, later the Labour MP for Worsley and Eccles South. (Keeley, long considered a reliable figure on the Labour right, is one of the late retirements in this cycle, as it happens.)

But in both instances, the Labour vote dropped significantly compared with the previous election: even though 2019 was a bad election for the Labour party, it was particularly so in Bassetlaw.

So we can have a pretty good idea about how the rows over Abbott’s and Shaheen’s candidacies will play out in their seats of Hackney North and Chingford and Woodford Green. We will see drops in the Labour vote, though given the national circumstances that is certainly not going to stop Labour holding on to Hackney North and may not prevent it winning Chingford, given its lead nationally.

But the debate over Abbott’s constituency is different; there is no example of the sharp practices in Labour’s rule book happening to someone with her national profile. She is one of Labour’s most recognised and recognisable MPs. No other MP would trigger a letter from luminaries such as Lenny Henry and David Harewood to the Guardian saying she should be able to stand. The standing of Abbott, and not of anyone else, means these rows are dominating the conversation at Westminster and in the broadcast studios.

What has also changed is the media itself. This row is being sent to people across the country by the BBC news app — not just being discussed by specialist outfits. This side of Labour, a party of fixed contests and rather brutal internal conflict, rarely gets seen in public. Now it is harder than ever to hide. While I don’t think for a moment the effect nationwide will be anything like those sharp falls in St Helens in 2001 or Bassetlaw in 2019, it will have some marginal effect on Labour at least.

And that’s why I think when the dust settles on this set of fights over selection, Abbott will still be the Labour candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington: if she wants to be.

The flipside to the above is that while, to some voters, getting rid of Abbott is everything that is wrong with Starmer’s Labour party, it is also a sign that the party has changed for the better. Labour’s misfortune is that one of their oldest and ugliest traditions — in these fast-tracked selections — now involves a well-known figure of whom few people have neutral opinions.

Now try this

I’m off to the Barbican this weekend to see the LSO play one of my favourite pieces, Dvorak’s ninth symphony, which I’m very much looking forward to. However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

Top stories today

• Outgoing Tory MP quits ‘unrecognisable’ party | Conservative MP Mark Logan said he would support Labour at the election. Rishi Sunak is struggling with an exodus of nearly a quarter of his parliamentary party.

• UK ‘bottom of league table’ | UK living standards have underperformed those of most wealthy countries since the Conservatives entered government in 2010, according to research published on Friday by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

• Green machine | Keir Starmer offers only “incremental change” from the ruling Conservatives, the Green party said as it launched an election campaign that pitched the party to the left of Labour.

• Puncturing parties’ tax promises | Most British voters expect their taxes to go up after the UK general election whichever of the two main parties wins on July 4, despite efforts by the Conservatives and Labour to play down the prospect of rises.

Below is the Financial Times’s live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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