Is Diane Abbott lazy?

Diane Abbott chose to give the Daily Telegraph her first interview since being nominated for the Labour Party leadership contest.

The tone is friendly despite the fourth paragraph reading: "Her critics, some of them women, view her as an arrogant or idle upstart manipulated by opponents who stand to benefit by having a plump, black, 57-year-old single mother to enliven what promised to be a homogenised field."

Diane is quoted saying: "Some people say 'Oh, Diane’s so lazy.’ They don’t realise the demands of a busy constituency and bringing up a child alone...”

Michael White, political editor at the Guardian also discussed this lazy allegation in a blog post last week. He said it wasn't uncommon for Labour colleagues to describe her as "Arrogant, unpopular, lazy, disloyal, the kind of foolishly leftwing MP who had done Labour so much harm since the 1980s..."

White also said that Abbott appears to have upset Hackney North Labour Party: "My apparatchik friend claims that Abbott's constituency party was cross with her for not supporting fellow Campaign Group MP John McDonnell, the would-be candidate who stood down yesterday in favour of helping a black female contender make the cut."

However White said he was a fan of Abbott's leadership bid.

On the eve of the elections in May, Dave Hill wrote in his Clapton Pond Blog: "More seriously, there has to be a danger that when incumbent politicians are as firmly installed as most of ours they get complacent and lazy and dull. Abbott, after all, has recently been accused of getting a bit grand and we don't want that sort of thing round here."

In the Telegraph piece she said that she wants to get married again and that public school was the making of her son. Hackney was mentioned in the piece once.