That Starmer fella...

Having a look at YouGov popularity, in terms of name recognition and positive/negative sentiment she's actually on a par with people like Kwarteng, Berlusconi, Netanyahu and less popular than Gerry Adams and Nadine Dorries.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/explore/public_figure/Diane_Abbott
https://yougov.co.uk/ratings/politics/fame/public-figures/all

Obviously racism/prejudice has played a huge part in the hatred against her, but jesus

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Having a look at YouGov popularity

Don't want to harsh your Abbott-bashing buzz, but the median popularity for a UK politician is 11, which is exactly what her rank is. Mean is 12.1, so she's slightly below, but you'd expect that with skewed data.

If you still want to use popularity as a metric here ("Popularity is the % of people who have a positive opinion on a topic"), you might want to have a quick look at who tops the ranks: Farage (followed by Johnson, Starmer, Blunkett, Brown, Mordaunt, Kinnock, Ed Miliband, Khan, and Major).

She's obviously much higher on the "fame" scale than average. Interestingly, there's a strong linear relationship between fame and popularity for which she's an outlier. If I were actually studying this, that's what I'd be asking questions about. A quick eye-test seems to show that all the other outliers in this case are politicians who have held positions of power, mostly very recently (Gove, Hammond, Salmond, Kwarteng, Coffey).

the median popularity for a UK politician is 11, which is exactly what her rank is. Mean is 12.1, so she's slightly below, but you'd expect that with skewed data ... Interestingly, there's a strong linear relationship between fame and popularity for which she's an outlier

That's because popularity excludes "don't knows". To take a random example Seema Malhotra (who I've never heard of) has 12% popularity but only 23% of people know who she is. So approx 50% of the people who have heard of her, like her. In other words the median popularity isn't very meaningful because most people won't have heard of most politicians, and that's why I picked a few random examples like you have done with Gove, Hammond, Salmond, Kwarteng, Coffey.

Truss and Kwarteng are good analogues really - unpopular with the general public and factional within their party. Kwarteng has stood down and Truss is running. If you were Sunak would you bar Truss from running? I don't know but she appears to be toeing the party line better than Abbott is at the moment

It's essential that don't knows are excluded. The data would be meaningless otherwise.

that's why I picked a few random examples like you have done with Gove, Hammond, Salmond, Kwarteng, Coffey.

They weren't random. They just weren't given a metric for measuring their "outlier-ness". They were selected as people with high fame and low popularity, working down the list when sorting by popularity first and fame second (which for some reason YouGov doesn't do - in fact, I don't quite understand how it breaks ties. I'm sure it's reported somewhere, but I just pulled the data and did it myself).

I've no skin in the Tories selection process, so not really worried about your Truss hypothetical.

Let me put it this way: the fact that Abbott is not popular is not the most meaningful thing here. Her popularity on the whole is unremarkable. It's that she's not popular in terms of her "fame," and that seems to be unique. For someone who hasn't held a position of power to be disliked (or, "not liked" as the case may be) as much as she is, is worth reflecting on. I think we can come up with reasons why this may be the case.

Whether we think those reasons are enough to deny her the chance to keep her seat as a Labour MP is an opinion we can all hold. I'd prefer not to pander to the people who dislike her, and instead let, first, Labour members in Hackney decide (not going to happen), and second, let the people of Hackney decide (might happen).

Seema Malhotra is excellent.

Do you think Faiza Shaheen was also phished? And that it was a coincidence that she received official news after the news broke in the Times?

Just done some reading up on this and I think Faiza is a different kettle of fish to Abbott - she liked a bunch of posts including one which suggested that "professional organisations" were mobilising people to attack those who criticise Israel. She may be a decent person and a decent candidate but I can absolutely see why she would not be a candidate.

Unfortunately there is a factional element to this so there I think it's possible in this situation that one or other Labour faction may have leaked it to the Times. But I don't think that applies to Abbott for the reasons I already outlined.

It's essential that don't knows are excluded. The data would be meaningless otherwise.

You could give popularity amongst people who know the politician, which is the more typical way of doing it I believe. Seema Mulhotra - ~52% of people who know who she is like her. Abbott - ~14% of people who know she is like her.

I've not skin in the Tories selection process

Okay, but that's why it's easier to make an more objective assessment of whether Truss is a liability to the Tory party overall.

I think I am just so jaded from 14 years of Tories and Brexit and Trump that I'd sacrifice pretty much any politician's career to get the Tories out. It's a sad state of affairs but I don't feel like we (the left) have the elbow room for principles.

The question is whether a fight with Dianne Abbott does more or less damage than just letting her stand

You could give popularity amongst people who know the politician, which is the more typical way of doing it I believe

I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but I'm certain they are taking popularity from those who know the politician. I'm fairly certain they don't even ask those who don't know of a politician what they think about them (+/-). This is what I meant by excluding "don't knows" - it's essential.

They won't just use raw %s from respondents because that's neither informative, nor the best use of the data they collect. The results will be representative (or weighted to be so) based on demographic characteristics. They'll use these characteristics to infer what other people of similar characteristics would think about something if they knew about it.

Despite the political history of YouGov, they are a very good polling organisation with some incredibly bright statisticians and methodologists.

They're not infallible, though.

Okay, but that's why it's easier to make an more objective assessment of whether Truss is a liability to the Tory party overall.

There's way too many complexities to make the cases comparable. This is weeds + 1000000.

Just done some reading up on this and I think Faiza is a different kettle of fish to Abbott - she liked a bunch of posts including one which suggested that "professional organisations" were mobilising people to attack those who criticise Israel. She may be a decent person and a decent candidate but I can absolutely see why she would not be a candidate.

Not really relevant to my point. My point was about her getting the news from the Times before the Labour party told her anything. That is, this is something which happens. Which you agree with (in this case). But:

Unfortunately there is a factional element to this so there I think it's possible in this situation that one or other Labour faction may have leaked it to the Times. But I don't think that applies to Abbott for the reasons I already outlined.

As far as I can tell, your reason was "neither faction would benefit so they wouldn't do it." I gave you, what I think is, a very reasonable reason why they would do it. And that also ignores the possibility that it was just a - again - cockup. A bad choice. But that's fine, we can disagree. Certainly not keen to go in circles on this.

Peace!

Feeling entirely possible that Labour will sabotage themselves over pointless factionalism. I hope everyone involved is proud of themselves. Talk about trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

This. They need to offer Abbot a peerage and hope she takes it

she's an astute politician

Maybe she was but she hasn't really shown this recently.

No doubt she has been harshly treated, the screwing up the numbers is a perfect illustration of this as loads of politicians make similar blunders and it's forgotten a few days afterwards, but she also doesn't help herself.

The party went through a huge anti-semitism scandal with her being a very visible supporter of the leader at the time and she then thought it was a good idea to write to a newspaper, unprompted, to explain how although Jewish people might have it bad they don't suffer the same as black people.

What did she think was going to happen, people were going to agree with her and say "good point"? It was just such an unnecessary shooting herself in the foot and giving the Labour party the chance to act against her (which they have also done very badly).

They need to offer Abbot a peerage and hope she takes it

I think it would be really difficult for them to do after some of the stuff Abbott has said over the last few months. Accusing Starmer of a 'purge' against leftwing candidates, verifying a story without confirming it with the leadership first, directly contradicting Starmer's position on R4 last week - I would love for it to happen but I think it'd make Starmer look too weak. If I were in his shoes, I wouldn't do it.

I think it's an easy one. Recognition of her as the first black, female MP and reward for her long public service. Starmer comes across as magnanimous rather than vindictive.

It's a limited attack line for the Tories because it's easy to defend against given some of the peerages they've handed out.

Ditto

Where are these Legions of the Left that will wreck any Starmer majority?
I remember that the nomination paper for Corbyn to stand for the Labour leadership, (it was his 'turn' to lose as the token Tribune Group representative), had some decidedly rightwing Labour MPs who believed in a democratic election, because there were not enough Tribunites to meet the minimum number of nominees.
With Starmer/ his team controlling access to the prospective candidate list, how many 'of the Left' can there possibly be?

From a Class War viewpoint, (not a member), Diane Abbott needs to he sacked off/given a peerage for sending her offspring into private education.

I don't remember all this hand wringing when Momentum were actively seeking to deselect sitting MPs under Corbyn.

That was totally different.

Meh. I do understand your point, but: "But Corbyn!" has to be centrists' "But her emails!" I.e., it feels like an often disingenuous attempt to stop criticism through tangential whataboutism.

I'm sure we could come up with many examples of deselection being discussed previously. I'm also sure we could come up with loads of reasons why it may not be a like-for-like comparison. But the goal isn't actually to discuss those things, so there's no point.

The reason I stopped being a party member is because the factionalism that is endemic in left wing politics, at least in the UK, is never ending and a large proportion of the membership spend most of their energy on fighting their internal enemies rather than focusing on getting people to vote for them.

I think what is going on at the moment is unedifying, but I'm not surprised by it in the slightest.

Not going to disagree with any of that.