Diane Abbott Banked £110,000 From BBC Punditry

Labour frontbencher Diane Abbott has raked in £110,000 of taxpayers’ cash from her appearances on the BBC, it has emerged.

The shadow home secretary makes regular appearances on the BBC’s late night politics programme, This Week, for which she is paid £700 a time, according to figures seen by The Sun.

Since 2003, her total fees have amounted to £110,000, equivalent to 756 annual licence fees – or 3,600 police officers, according to her dodgy maths

The MP had made headlines earlier this week, when, in an interview with LBC radio Tuesday, Abbott claimed a newly unveiled Labour policy to hire 10,000 new policemen and women would cost the government £300,000, giving each new recruit a salary of just £30 a year.

When questioned whether that was right she corrected herself, saying: “Haha, no. I mean… sorry. They will cost… they will, it will cost, erm, about… about £80million.”

The new figure was still only equivalent to £8,000 per recruit. She later gave the correct figure of £300 million after being handed it by an aide, although by that time she had also come unstuck on how many officers were to be recruited, giving figures ranging from 25,000 to 250,000.

Despite the widely mocked appearance, she was back on the nation’s screens on Friday to give her assessment of Labour’s performance in the local elections – and again got her figures wrong.

Speaking to ITV, Abbott wildly underestimated her party’s losses, saying: “At the time of us doing this interview I think the net losses are about 50.”

She was corrected by the interviewer, who informed her the party was already down 125 seats, to which she responded: “Well, the last time I looked we had net losses of a hundred but obviously this is a moving picture.”

The local election has proved to be a disaster for the Labour Party under their hard left leader Jeremy Corbyn, with their Conservative rivals making huge gains across the country at Labour’s expense.

The Conservatives made a net gain of 563 seats and took control of an additional 11 councils, bringing their total up to 28 councils, the vast majority in England, while Labour lost control of five councils and shed 382 seats. It was also a bad result for UKIP, who lost all but one of the 146 council seats they were defending.