Oh dear. It seems that the sage of Hackney has blundered once more. Having lost the Labour whip last year for an asinine antisemitism letter, Diane Abbott is doing little it seems to try and win it back. She took to Twitter yesterday to criticise Wes Streeting, the Shadow Health Secretary, for daring to suggest that a Labour government would use private healthcare to cut the NHS backlog.

‘There is no principled case for using the private sector,’ she sniffed. ‘Just as the “spare capacity” in private health Wes talks about does not exist. Only #NHS doctors, nurses and the £million contracts Wes will give them.’ So it was left to Streeting, a comprehensive state school boy, to deliver the obvious retort to Abbott, who famously sent her own son to the elite City of London School. “You used the private sector while a Labour government improved public services,” he said. He then quoted her subsequent attempt to defend her decision: “Since I made that decision Labour built five new secondary schools in Hackney, one of them with some of the best GCSE results in the country. I wouldn’t have to make the same choice today.”

Really? The problem hasn’t gone away: there is still a pretty big attainment gap for pupils from a Caribbean background: the below shows the ‘Attainment 8’ scores at GCSE level by ethnicity in 2022 in the London Borough of Hackney.

Abbott was right to highlight a problem 20 years ago, but let’s not pretend it has been solved now – after Blair, Cameron or anyone else. At the time, Abbott said he was acting like any mother and putting her child first – by sending him private and avoiding a state system where black Caribbean boys seriously underperformed. As she put it at the time “When I’m on my deathbed, would I regret having been skewered on this show at 12 o’clock at night or doing the right thing by my son?”

Wes Streeting wants to do the right thing by patients and put them ahead of ideology – by sending them private, just as she did. A fair point, which he made pretty well. Labour’s health spokesman certainly knows how to inflict a burn.