Diane Abbott fires back after ITV News tweets her interview stumble

Diane Abbott has accused broadcasters of being proud to pursue “fact-free, research-free and investigation-free” journalism and of failing to acknowledge racist abuse against her.

The shadow home secretary claimed that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, and the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, would not be treated in the same way if they got their figures wrong, after a difficult interview with ITV News on Thursday.

During the interview, the senior Labour figure struggled to recall the cost of Labour’s plans to recruit additional police officers – echoing an election campaign interview that was branded a “car crash” by her critics.

Writing in the Guardian, Abbott said she had found herself “in the middle of a ‘gotcha’ journalism storm”. She said the news story should have focused on the government statistics, which revealed the highest annual rise in crime in a decade.

“This, together with the fact that we are seeing the lowest police numbers in 30 years, is a story. It shows that Tory austerity is actually making us all less safe,” she said.

But the Hackney MP added: “But one media outlet was not really interested in the big story of the day. They just wanted to catch Diane Abbott out. So, on camera, they asked me how we would pay for the extra policemen.”

Referencing the LBC interview during the general election campaign, where she stumbled over figures, Abbott said the question caused her to freeze and “for a fateful few seconds I couldn’t get the words out”.

She claimed that was enough for the television journalist editing the footage.

“They put up a carefully edited video on Twitter. But they didn’t include anything I had said about the crime statistics. It was just about a 20-second stumble. Their considered news judgment was that the ‘story’ was not the rise in rape and violent crime, but making a politician look stupid,” she wrote.

ITV disputed her characterisation of the interview. A spokesman said: “We take issue with a number of points that Diane Abbott makes in her Guardian comment piece. This was not a ‘gotcha’ moment. ITV News sent a producer to record Labour reaction from the Shadow Home Secretary on the issue of the day – crime figures and policing numbers – as is routine. The unedited interview then ran on air and online. The News at Ten programme running order made it clear that the main story focus was crime, and included the Labour Party’s position on the issue.

“The Shadow Home Secretary’s interview response on numbers was then shown immediately afterwards. This was judged to be newsworthy because of previous interviews she had given during the 2017 election campaign.”

She added that the ITV correspondent had “made it clear on air that any racist and misogynistic abuse Diane Abbott receives is completely unacceptable”.

In her piece, Abbott suggested she ought not to complain given that the interview was “free entertainment in an age of austerity”.

But she argued that it was wrong for journalists to see her stumble as the story rather than the underlying issue. And she suggested this was a break from her time as a television news journalist in the 1980s, when a news editor would not have made the mistake the story.

“They were proud of their fact-free, research-free and investigation-free ‘story’. They were unmoved by the racist abuse online (including the usual death threats) that their tweet had already triggered. They were entirely unable to explain why Philip Hammond or Boris Johnson getting their figures wrong was not treated in the same way as Diane Abbott doing the same thing. And they were very clear that they saw no reason to carry what I had actually said about the crime statistics,” she wrote.

That, she suggested, had made way for the cheaper form of “gotcha” journalism.