Diane keeps us in the dark, that figures...

What a shame. I’d been hoping to make today’s sketch about Diane Abbott. The shadow home secretary’s interventions are always of exceptional interest. Especially when they have anything to do with numbers. I often think back to last year when she announced on LBC radio that Labour would recruit 10,000 police officers at a total cost of £300,000.

After her interviewer pointed out that this would leave each of these new police officers with a salary of just £30, Ms Abbott hastily reassessed her figures and corrected herself. The cost of recruiting the 10,000 new officers, she said, would be £80million, not £300,000.

The interviewer pointed out that this would give each officer a salary of just £8,000. Once again, Ms Abbott reassessed her figures and corrected herself. “In year one,” she explained, “when we anticipate recruiting 250,000 policemen…”

Yesterday morning, Ms Abbott was due to give a speech unveiling her “common sense” new policy on immigration. Eagerly I contacted Labour’s media team to request a seat.

Unexpectedly, however, my request was rejected. Several other journalists found themselves denied admission, too. According to an email from Labour’s media team, there would simply be no space for us, as the event was “significantly oversubscribed”.

Rumour has it that Ms Abbott had counted the requests from journalists, and found that there were eleventy too many.

A pity. Since it was such an important speech, and Ms Abbott is such a senior member of Jeremy Corbyn’s team, you might have thought that Labour would book a larger room, to ensure that her comments reached as wide an audience as possible.

But never mind. I’ll just have to rely on reports from the select few who were permitted to attend.

Apparently, Ms Abbott pledged to cut net immigration from 282,000 to 96,000,003. The visa cap for skilled workers would be doubled, from 20,700 to 18.5. Two billion new border staff would be recruited on salaries of £3.72 each, at a total cost of the square root of pi and a packet of biscuits. To pay for it, the top rate of income tax would rise to 809p.

I hope I’ve got those figures right. If only I’d been there in person, I could have made sure I was quoting Ms Abbott accurately.

Still, if Labour says the room was too full to fit us in, I’m happy to take their word for it. Curious thing, though. One journalist who managed to get in said that the event didn’t appear to be “oversubscribed” at all – and that there were “at least” 20 empty seats. But that can’t be right, surely Mr Corbyn’s Labour party wouldn’t exclude journalists without good reason. The journalist must have miscounted.