Tweet with care

The press continually assure us that this will be the first-ever digital general election.  This is ever so slightly hyperbolic;  I remember that the internet figured heavily in the 2005 election and was not much less in evidence in 2001.

However, what is absolutely certain is that this will be the first-ever Twitter general election.  Twitter, which was launched in 2006 and is now hugely popular, will have the power to break election news and disseminate it instantly to a potentially enormous audience.  It will be a massively important medium for promoting political awareness. 

At the same time, Twitter will also have the power to damage or break political careers.  An injudicious tweet may come back to haunt the tweeter a thousand thousandfold.

In fact, it already has.  On the morning of 15 February, David Wright, the Labour MP for Telford and a Government whip, went on a bit of a tweeting binge, in the course of which he abused his political opponents in a particularly obnoxious manner.  All electronic hell broke loose about a seemingly startled Mr Wright, who attempted, vainly, to offer apologies.  Ultimately, he gave up the struggle and tweeted rather pathetically:

What a commotion today. Looks like my tweets have been tinkered with. I will keep you posted.

He never did; Mr Wright hasn’t ventured onto Twitter since, presumably fearful of what his reappearance might provoke.  He has, it would seem, tweeted his last.

Despite his embarrassment, however, Mr Wright’s career survived.  He was still serving in the Government whips’ office when Parliament was prorogued.  He is now seeking re-election in Telford, where I hope he will lose to my good friend Tom Biggins.  He is basically a nice chap who for some reason didn’t realise that Twitter should be treated by politicians much as they would handle a particularly unstable stick of gelignite.

One Labour politician who did not survive an ill-judged dalliance with Twitter, however, is Stuart MacLennan, the Labour Parliamentary candidate for Moray.  Mr MacLennan, in an astonishing burst of uncontrolled vulgarity, managed to malign in the most coarsely offensive terms possible the leaders of both the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, as well as the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Labour MP Dianne Abbot and the entire elderly population of Scotland.  He even succeeded in insulting a banana.

Yesterday, in a rare and commendable display of decisiveness, Gordon Brown clipped the errant tweeter’s wings.  Politically speaking, Mr MacLennan is no more.  Labour will have to find a new candidate for Moray pretty darn quickly.

Mr MacLennan’s Twitter site has also been culled; search for it and you will find only a bemused namesake: a Scottish disc jockey who yesterday expressed perplexity that his low-profile site had attracted 50 new followers in a day.  Perhaps he might like to consider standing for Labour in Moray and save them the cost of reprinting all those posters.  There again, probably he wouldn’t.

However, take a look at Google’s cache of the Labour MacLennan’s site and you will find an astonishingly prescient post; on 6 April, Mr MacLennan tweeted:

Iain Dale reckons the biggest gaffes will likely be made by candidates on Twitter – what are the odds it’ll be me?

I don’t know the answer to that, but I wish I’d made enquiries on Betfair.