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I think your giving her too much credit, go back and listen to it again. She either doesn't know the difference or she isn't able to string together a coherent sentence.
Can you imagine the headlines (beyond twitter) if Diane Abbott had made that gaff over, and over again.
Do we know what she doing to help the victims of counter terrorism yet ?
She could be a manchurian candidate
HousecatHST-
Yeah - I'm not sympathetic to her at all, and I give her no credit for anything she's achieved. The interview was a car crash, but the attention shouldn't have been wholly on that phrase.
She couldn't string together a sentence as her objective in the interview was just to keep talking to limit the questions that could be posed to her, all the while saying nothing and making no actionable statement. It's that evasiveness, and her (and other ministers mindset) that that's how the job should be done that should be better challenged.
The actual misspeak - I (personally) think it's unlikely she doesn't know the difference, and I don't think that's as big a deal as the world made out. Focusing on it was pretty funny, but probably a diversion.
Can you imagine the headlines (beyond twitter) if Diane Abbott had made that gaff over, and over again.
Yes, it would be all over the place, but we'd be defending her by saying it was an accidental phrase that had got stuck in her head over the course of the interview, which is the simplest and most likely explanation. There's no denying that the broadcasters (and audience) have double standards.
Edit: I've just read her comment on the floods in the News thread:
"The whole of government is working and empathising with the
individuals that rightly have been affected."She's a really bad speaker.
christianSpaceman
This is overblown - that's just a phrase that she misspoke the first time, then it got stuck in her head- it's happened to all of us.
I can't actually remember what she said in that interview apart from that, I believe it was a studious exercise in avoiding the question or making a statement. The press should have hounded her for her evasiveness, but that seemed to go relatively unremarked upon.
(I'm not saying she's not a halfwit - she might be, or more likely someone else's useful idiot as I find it unlikely that anyone could navigate their way to Home Secretary without some form of intelligence or awareness).