It has often been predicted that our political class’s engagement with new media will end in tears, and Sarah Brown and Boris Johnson will both be refining their “twattergy” (a composite of Twitter and strategy) after this week.
Brown’s son hijacked her Twitter account in order to the post the following:
fvdfzsrsazxzzxcvbnmadgfhjjkqwrtyuuuiop
The rogue tweet came just days before Gordon Brown launched an initiative on children and internet safety. Speaking yesterday at the launch, Brown said the “message of gobbledegook” had taught him a “big lesson” about the need for supervision.
Over at the Media Blog, Malcolm Coles scents a conspiracy:
[D]id Gordon Brown get his wife to send a deliberately gibberish tweet so he could tell a funny story a week later about their son hitting the keys while they weren’t watching?
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month
Meanwhile, Boris has been formally reprimanded after using his official mayoral Twitter account for party political purposes. On the day the Sun defected to the Tories, he tweeted: “The sun has got his hat on, hip hip hip hip hooray”.
By continuing to tweet and winning nearly 59,000 followers, Boris is stealing a march on David Cameron, who, despite embracing new media with WebCameron, has persistently refused to join Twitter.
It’s likely that Twitterphobic politicians will be further discouraged by the experience of Labour’s “Twitter tsar” Kerry McCarthy, who was bombarded with more than 100 questions at the request of the comedian Ross Noble. We now breathlessly await McCarthy’s appearance at parliament in a gorilla suit.
Asked by one user if she would wear the costume, she replied: “I don’t think it’s expressly forbidden. I could give it a try?”
You can, of course, follow the New Statesman team on Twitter
Content from our partners
Related
