Abbott’s radio silence

Anne McElvoy’s report for the Today Programme on the Labour leadership this morning is well worth listening to. It featured all the usual suspect and some classic moments—Tessa Jowell damming Ed Miliband with faint praise and Ed Balls’ henchmen Charlie Whelan going out of his way to praise Andy Burnham—but the really memorable bit came when McElvoy asked Abbott about her decision to send her son to private school. As with her infamous interview with Andrew Neil, Abbott simply refused to answer. There was just a period of dead air.

Abbott’s refusal to answer this question, a not unreasonable one, is even more bizarre when you consider that at a Labour leadership hustings on Friday she herself brought the subject up, describing it as the hardest political decision of her life.