Oh dear. It’s not turning out to be a great week for Diane Abbott. On Tuesday, the shadow home secretary found herself in a tight spot after she got her numbers completely wrong when trying to explain Labour’s new police policy, in an interview with LBC.
With her party today suffering a disappointing result in the local elections, Abbott appeared on ITN to try and put a positive spin on the news. Alas things took a turn for the worst when Abbott was asked about the scale of Labour’s defeat — and came up short:
Abbott claimed her party’s net losses amounted to ‘about 50’ — before being informed that it was actually over double that, at 125. She then recalculated, and said she thought the net loses were in fact 100:Shadow home secretary @HackneyAbbott with yet another numbers #gaffe after she massively underestimates @labour’s local elections losses. pic.twitter.com/OtOWY4JGKI — ITN Source News (@itnsourcenews) 5 May 2017
Still, she is at least getting closer with regards to her miscalculations. On Tuesday, she claimed that Labour’s plan to put more bobbies on the street would cost £300,000 before changing her mind and saying it would actually be closer to £80m. It later turned out that both figures were wrong.Interviewer: Do you know the number of net losses so far for Labour? Diane Abbott: At the time of us doing this interview I think the net losses are about 50. Interviewer: There are actually 125 net losses so far. Diane Abbott: Well the last time I looked we had net losses of 100 but obviously this is a moving picture.
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