Recently, a semiclassical approach to diffraction has been proposed, which treats the proton as a classical colour field. The present paper demonstrates that this approach is consistent with the concept of diffractive parton distributions. The diffractive quark and gluon distributions are expressed through integrals of non-Abelian eikonal factors in the fundamental and adjoint representation respectively. As a by-product, previously calculated diffractive cross sections for processes with a final state gluon are rederived in a simpler way.