YESTERDAY Amber Rudd landed in hot water after calling Labour MP Diane Abbott a “coloured woman”.

The gaffe, or wrong turn of phrase was unfortunate for the Hastings MP and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

From the context of what she was saying during her radio interview, it is clear she did not intend anything malicious.

But as a former Home Secretary and experienced front bench politician, she really should have known better, and known it can be an offensive term.

In this day and age, politicians and those in the public eye are subject to ever greater levels of scrutiny.

All their social media posts, media interviews, speeches, and even conversations with voters, can become banana skins to slip up on.

Indeed even comments or words they have said in the past can come back to haunt them, as can their actions before they were in politics or when they were much younger.

Recently the former Labour MP for Penistone Angela Smith got herself into trouble over her “tinge” comments.

To be fair to Amber Rudd, she apologised for using the term, and she was trying to help stamp out some of the abuse that she knows MPs like Diane Abbott are suffering on a regular basis.

Perhaps there is something ugly about our politics these days, with extremist columnists, and also with politicians accused of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

But it makes it much harder to combat those evils if politicians don’t choose their words carefully, and create talking points for the wrong reasons.