Diane Abbott says she intends to “run and win” as the Labour candidate in the constituency she has represented for 37 years, amid reports that the Labour party will offer peerages to outgoing MPs.
The veteran Labour MP said he had never been offered a seat in the House of Lords and would not accept it if it was offered to him.
Her statement came ahead of a crucial meeting on Tuesday of the ruling Labour Party’s national executive committee (NEC) which will decide whether to back her and other candidates in the few remaining seats.
“I have been nominated as the Labour candidate for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. I will be running as the Labour candidate and I intend to win,” Mr Abbott said on X (formerly Twitter).
Close friend Shami Chakrabarti said on Sunday that Mr Abbott was still considering his future, while shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper denied that there had been an offer to grant the long-serving MP a peerage to pave the way for another candidate.
“That’s not how the system works. There is a process in place with an independent committee that reviews appointments, there is a process in place around how many appointments the prime minister makes and so on,” Cooper told Sky News on Sunday.
But several left-wing MPs told The Sunday Times they had been offered to give up their seats.
“No party can do that, no party can promise that,” Cooper said, but in reality party leaders and the prime minister have that power. Nominations are vetted by an independent committee, but parties decide who to nominate. The committee checks that nominees are trustworthy, but has no veto power.
Mr Abbott had been widely expected among Labour MPs to announce his retirement and be granted a peerage, but last week Labour officials told him he would be barred from standing, and he said he still intended to fight for office.
After the controversy that dominated election news last week, Labour leader Keir Starmer said Mr Abbott was free to stand as the Labour candidate.
Mrs Chakrabarti, a former shadow justice secretary, said her friend had endured a “sometimes squalid week of being briefed anonymously and unauthorised in a suit, with her feet on the table and, perhaps, too much White House watching”.
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“I hope they remember that it has to be country first, not faction first,” Mr Chakrabarti said in a Sunday interview with BBC One’s Laura Kuenssberg.
Labour has announced a string of candidates in safe constituencies who are close allies of Starmer and have worked to reform the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
They include six committee members, including Labour’s national executive committee chairman James Asser, of West Ham and Becton, and Luke Akehurst, of North Durham, a leading member of Labour to Win, which is organising support to maintain centre influence in constituency and conference votes.
Other key figures in Mr Starmer’s project are running in safe constituencies, including Josh Symonds, director of the think tank Labour Together, which backed Mr Starmer’s leadership bid, Alex Barros-Curtis, Labour’s legal chief who was key to Mr Corbyn’s ouster and numerous legal battles with former staff, and Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation in Swansea West.
