Keir Starmer ‘doesn’t have a feel for politics’ or the Labour Party, Diane Abbott says

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Sir Keir Starmer has no feel for politics or the Labour Party, Diane Abbott has said.

The veteran left-winger has said the prime minister’s top team lacks the skills to run the UK.

And Ms Abbott said that, amid briefings against her by those close to the PM ahead of the general election, she concluded “bugger that” and decided against standing down.

She was suspended from the Labour Party last April after claiming that Jewish people did not experience racism “all their lives” before withdrawing the remarks and apologising.

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And, speaking to the BBC, Ms Abbott said: “One of the things people forget or never knew about Keir Starmer is that he was only a member of the Labour Party for a very short time before he became leader.

“He doesn’t have a feel for the Labour Party and politics in general. People will say ‘he smashed all those Left-wingers’, but that’s the skill set of the people around him. Running the country, not so much.”

The damning comments come a month after Ms Abbott, in an interview with The Independent, said she has not spoken to Sir Keir in four years since they both served in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet.

At the time, she told The Independent that Sir Keir was guilty of trying to “force the left out” of the Labour Party and said her decision to run for re-election saved her left-wing colleagues because he otherwise would have “turned on them”.

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Asked about Sir Keir’s first six months in power, Ms Abbott said: “We’re going to have to see how things work out. What I will say is I never thought I’d say a good word about Tony Blair. But one thing Tony Blair was good at was empathy – and Starmer isn’t so great at empathy.

“The people around him think they’re so clever because they won by a landslide. Actually his proportion of the vote, I think it’s 33 per cent. His proportion of the vote is relatively small, and I think it would be a mistake to think ‘ooh, we won by a landslide, therefore we can get away with anything’. That’s not going to work.”

Ms Abbott has been a thorn in Sir Keir’s side since the general election, frequently criticising the prime minister in her prominent role as mother of the house, the oldest MP in the Commons.

Last week Ms Abbott accused Sir Keir of “breaking a promise” to women affected by changes to the state pension age, when he ruled out paying compensation to 3.8m Waspi women.

She said Waspi women “fought one of the most sustained and passionate campaigns for justice that I can remember”. And she said: “We did promise them that we would give them justice. I understand the issue about the cost but does the prime minister really understand how let down Waspi women feel today?”