It was always likely to be a strange day for Ellie Gellard, known to her (3,000-plus) Twitter followers as @BevaniteEllie. Just when you’d expect her to provide a blow-by-blow account of Labour’s manifesto launch in 140-character bursts, all went quiet on the Twittersphere.
Why? Because she was there in person, on the podium, introducing the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Not a bad gig for a 20-year-old party activist.
What followed was fairly inevitable. First, her previous online utterings were trawled for something “embarrassing”, or at least not on-message (I’m not sure they’re the same thing).
Sure enough, this blog post came to light. Judging by the social media audit trail, it looks like Conservative press office researchers got busy pretty quickly: their head of press, Henry Macrory, tweeted it just before 3pm, and it wasn’t long before Tory Bear and Iain Dale were following his lead.
Second, she was asked to do a media interview. But, much to the dismay of Sky News, she said no. Nonetheless, expect a smattering of mini-profiles in tomorrow’s papers.
(Incidentally, last time she made a mini-splash was when she successfully campaigned to show the “Against the Odds” video as an election broadcast.)
UPDATE (13 April): Sure enough, the Times and the Daily Telegraph have prominent pictures of Gellard on their front pages this morning.
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