In May Diane Abbott was humiliated in an LBC radio show when she said it would cost just £300,000 to pay for an extra 10,000 police officers.
She later upper this to £80million, but this would still fall far short and only give each policeman an annual salary of £8,000. The policy is actually costed at £300m a year by 2021/22.
The Prime Minister said the blunder was no laughing matter and shows the chaos that lies ahead if Jeremy Corbyn is elected PM on June 8.
Ms Abbott was left stuttering as she failed to answer the simple question of how much it would cost to implement Labour’s policing pledge.
The toe-curling appearance on LBC radio raised questions about the basic competence of Mr Corbyn’s shadow cabinet team.
Although Mr Corbyn tried to claim he had not been ’embarrassed’ by his senior colleague.
Asked how much the policy would cost, Ms Abbott said: ‘Well, erm… if we recruit the 10,000 policemen and women over a four-year period, we believe it will be about £300,000.’
Presenter Nick Ferrari replied: ‘£300,000 for 10,000 police officers? What are you paying them?’
A confused Ms Abbott replied : ‘Haha, no. I mean… sorry. They will cost… they will, it will cost, erm, about… about £80million.’
Ferrari suggested even that would mean paying each police officer just £8,000 over four years – or £2,000 annually. The average salary of an officer is around £30,000.
A floundering Ms Abbott, who was not in the studio but could be heard frantically leafing through papers, said: ‘We get to that figure because we anticipate recruiting 25,000 extra police officers a year at least over a period of four years and we’re looking at both what average police wages are generally, but also specifically police wages in London.’
Days later, the shadow home secretary gave another car crash interview when asked what the party’s net losses were so far in local elections.
‘At the time of us doing this interview, I think the net losses are about 50,’ she said, to which the ITV journalist replied: ‘They are actually 125 net losses so far.’
But Ms Abbott said: ‘Well the last time I looked we had net losses of 100 but obviously this is a moving picture.’
In another encounter, Ms Abbott was asked by Dermot Murnaghan on Sky News about the Harris Report, commissioned by Sadiq Khan in October 2016, which gave 127 recommendations to improve London’s ‘readiness’ for terror.
She was asked which were crucial recommendations and Ms Abbott could only tell him it was about ‘preparedness and resilience’.
In a bizarre exchange, Murnaghan said: ‘What about physical resilience?’
Ms Abbott replied: ‘Yes, I think physical resilience is important…’
Murnaghan pressed again: ‘There was a specific aspect of physical resilience.’
Ms Abbott said: ‘I think that physical resilience is important.’