There is a classic TV news interview in which former Labour minister Geoff Hoon silently stares at the camera pretending not to hear the reporter's difficult questions through his earpiece.

It's one way to side-step an embarrassing situation I suppose but only really works if the interview is not being carried out face-to-face – if it is, politicians must be more creative to avoid a grilling, as Labour shadow health minister Diane Abbott demonstrated this week.

Abbott, a black woman, had been having a conversation with someone on the social-networking website Twitter when she commented that "white people like to play divide and rule".

Despite being followed by 25,000-odd people on the website, Abbott appeared to forget they might all read the comment, which was directed to one particular Twitter user.

The next day the story had snowballed all over Twitter and on to the main news media in a way that can only happen when there is nothing else in politics to write about.

Parliament only returns on January 10, you see, meaning hacks are still scratching around for any story they can find.

By 10am on Thursday people were calling for Abbott's resignation.

It's a dangerous thing, Twitter. Even Leicester West MP Liz Kendall once had her wrist slapped by the authorities for taking a picture in the House of Lords and posting it on the site.

Anyway, Abbott was eventually forced on to TV to do a fire-fighting interview.

However, just as it came to the crucial part when she would explain her "white people" comment her phone apparently buzzed, she picked it up and just walked away from the camera.

Five minutes later, colleagues and I were laughing about the whole thing in Room 12 of the Press Gallery when Ed Miliband's communications man stormed in and started demanding to know who was doing the Abbott story.

When an unfortunate reporter admitted he was, the fellow strode over and, with the deftness of a jackhammer and proclaimed that it was Mr Miliband's phone call that had interrupted Abbott's interview.

With a pointing finger he bellowed that Abbott had not meant what people were saying she had meant and that if she had meant it Ed would have sacked her, but she didn't, so he wouldn't. In fact, he said, her comment had been "taken out of context".

It hadn't, of course. Abbott had just said something politically damaging and didn't want to admit it.

But you can't blame the Labour leader's office for employing the excuse.

Miliband, after all, had been at the sharp end of the "out of context" get-out only that day, after a man he once considered a father figure, Maurice Glasman, slated his record as Labour leader.

At the start of his leadership, Miliband had set Glasman up as a policy guru who would come up with the ideas to shape Labour's future. He even gave him a peerage.

But Thursday's papers were filled with Glasman's critique that as leader Ed had "flickered rather than shone", that his Labour seemed to have "no strategy, no narrative and little energy" and that it showed no sign of winning the economic argument against the Coalition.

"On the face of it these look like bad times for Ed Miliband and for Labour," said Glasman and, on the face of it, his comments were making them worse.

It was especially saddening for the embattled Labour leader because it all came shortly after he gave his new year message, in which he told people that, despite a likely grim 2012 ahead, "optimism can defeat despair".

He will certainly be hoping so, for his own sake. A recent ICM survey for The Guardian found Miliband had an approval rating of minus 17, in contrast to David Cameron who had a rating of plus five.

In terms of being "good in a crisis" the PM had a plus 10 rating, whereas Miliband had minus 23, and for saying what was right rather than "what was popular" Cameron scored plus 18 to Miliband's minus two.

While you would think that the most challenging problem for Cameron's leadership would be the economy, you would have said the same thing at the start of 2011.

Yet polls have shown the public trusting the Cameron/Osborne partnership to handle things more than Miliband and his shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

So, despite predictions of more economic difficulties to come, you have to suppose that without a credible challenge from Labour the electorate's views will not change.

Frustration with Miliband's leadership has been brewing heavily among the more rightish parts of Labour since he was elected.

But even some MPs who I would have thought were more neutral now appear to share some of Lord Glasman's disappointment.

My prediction is that if Ed does not turn things round properly in 2012 then calls for change will terminally set in.

Unfortunately, in an interview a few days ago, Ed suggested he had not yet seen the light.

"I'll carry on being what I am. I think that's what people want," he said earnestly.

Back to Glasman – when the peer was later challenged over his critique he, too, said his comments had been "taken out of context". Again, they weren't.

But oddly enough it was none other than Diane Abbott who neatly summed up how Ed should feel about the whole affair when she later said on Twitter: "Maurice Glasman [is] supposedly a father figure to Ed Mili. If I had a father like that I'd lock him up."