Diane Abbott's History Of Gaffes
Thursday 5 January 2012 15:58, UK
Diane Abbott, Labour frontbench MP and the first black woman to take a seat in the House of Commons, is well-known for her outspoken remarks.
The comment that is not the first apparent gaffe she has made.
Several have caused difficult headlines for her and her party.
But her straight-talking nature has helped her maintain a constituency majority of between 49% and 65% in every election since 1992.
* During the 2010 Labour leadership race, Ms Abbott raised eyebrows by stating: "West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children."
She made the remark to explain her decision to send her son James to a fee-paying school after having previously criticised the private sector.
BBC interviewer Andrew Neil responded: "So black mums love their kids more than white mums, do they?"
He went on to ask: "Supposing Michael [Portillo, also on the programme] said white mums will go to the wall for their children. Why did you say that? Isn't it a racist remark?"
* The Hackney North and Stoke Newington MP's decision to educate her child privately caused a storm of criticism in 2003 because Ms Abbott attacked her Labour colleague, Harriet Harman, for sending her son to a grammar school.
"She [Harman] made the Labour Party look as if we do one thing and say another," Ms Abbott said in 1997.
She has described her own decision as "indefensible" and "incoherent" but also said she feared her child would fall in with "black gangs" if he went to a state school.
* Ms Abbott reportedly said staff at her local east London hospital who were "blonde, blue-eyed Finnish girls" were not suitable to be nurses because they had "never met a black person before".
* She has been critical of the lack of power backbench MPs hold in the face of powerful prime ministers.
During Tony Blair's administration, she remarked: "The honest truth is that if this government were to propose the massacre of the first-born, it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons."
* When Labour MP Keith Vaz stood up in the Commons to praise the-then Home Secretary Alan Johnson in 2009, Ms Abbott was caught on camera making loud slurping noises and giggling.
Her response was taken to imply she thought the MP was trying to suck up to the frontbench.
The slurping sounds, picked up by the microphones in the House, prompted Mr Johnson to turn around and laugh in the direction of both Ms Abbott and Mr Vaz.