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.

Clapton Pond: no part in Sexby's gunpowder plot

Same view different atmosphere from Google Maps.























In 1905 Clapton Pond got a mention in "The Municipal Parks, Gardens and Open Spaces of London" but only because it shouldn't be confused with a better place up the road (Clapton Common?). The author of TMPG&OSoL, Lt. Col. Sexby V.D. (no mistake) wrote: "Beyond the quiet meadows are the lines of aspens and poplars, backed by the rounded forms of the elms about Walthamstow, with their masses of deep shadow, and on the sky-line the ridge of Epping Forest, with a spire here and there, sunlit, and standing out against the purples and ambers of the woods.'*

"These beauties, which were once visible from the common, are shut out by the row of houses called Buccleuch Terrace, built about a hundred years ago. On the common is a small pond, much in demand for skating in the winter, which must not be confounded with the better-known Clapton pond some distance down the main road. Behind the pond on the common is Stainforth House, once the residence of Mr. Richard Foster, and more recently of the late Suffragan Bishop of Bedford. Craven House, at the north end of the common (so named after a former owner Mr. Arthur Craven), was at one time the home of the late Mr. Samuel Morley, M.P. for Bristol.

"On the western side of the common is St. Thomas's Church, not a very ornate structure. In October, 1864, a terrific gunpowder explosion between Plumstead and Erith occurred, which shook the houses in Upper Clapton to their very foundations. St. Thomas's Church came off very badly, for the east wall was split from top to bottom by the force of the explosion."