I’ve missed you, Diane Abbott

I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life and I only properly realised this when she came back, gloriously, to fill it again. Hitherto I had been going about my business, writing columns, cooking for my family and so on, and perhaps to other people I seemed to be getting along normally enough – but in truth I was hollow inside, devoid of a sense of purpose. How uplifting it was to see her back in the headlines.

It is less her stupidity that I find attractive, more her perpetual sense of confusion. She makes a series of palpably absurd comments and then, in trying to excavate herself, makes things incalculably worse. She suggested that Jews do not suffer racism and that although white people ‘with points of difference’, such as red hair, encounter prejudice, they have not been subjected to the same racism as black people.