Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Did Jeremy Corbyn forget to unlock Diane Abbott’s talent?

Reading Jeremy Corbyn’s latest election document on the perennially hot potato of race, it was hard to know whether to shudder or snigger. Hearing that only Corbyn ‘can be trusted to unlock the talent of black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people’, my dirty mind was irresistibly drawn to the story told in the recent biography of the Glorious Leader of how he ‘showed off’ a naked Diane Abbott to the rest of Chess Club – sorry, his comrades in the socialist struggle – way back in the street-fighting, free-loving 1970s. According to a helpful nark in Rosa Prince’s book Comrade Corbyn: ‘One Sunday autumn morning…we were out leafleting. And for some reason he called four or five of us and said: ‘Oh, we’ve got to go back to my flat and pick up some leaflets.’ It seemed a bit odd – ‘Why the hell didn’t you bring them with you, Jeremy?’ So we all bowl along to his bedsit, follow Jeremy into the room; there on the mattress on the floor in the one room is Diane with the duvet up to her neck, saying: ‘What the ****’s going on?’’’

Not a week goes by in which Miss Abbott does not serve up to a snickering public further proof that she has been promoted wildly beyond her capabilities by her erstwhile paramour and it would take a mind far cleaner than mine not to wonder whether their sweaty trysts under that Duvet of Destiny might not have had a little something to do with her rapid rise.

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