Too many tweets

I love elections.  I love them most of all for the furious exaggerated hyperbole that they engender.  When it isn’t Alastair Darling – he who has presided over the largest peacetime budget deficit in British history – frothing at the mouth over Conservative plans to reduce a proposed tax rise and thereby reduce public spending by less than 1%, it’s the Liberal Democrats showing off massive scare posters that say that the Tories might increase VAT – even though they’ve said precisely the same thing themselves.

And now it’s a particularly juicy bit of Twitter-induced idiocy.  Some stripling Labour candidate up in Scotland has been posting on Twitter throughout the last few months and, in a break with the accepted PPC tradition of being as anodyne and tedious in 140 characters as most people manage in 140 pages, he has been a bit, um, controversial.  For example:

God this fairtrade, organic banana is shit. Can I have a slave-grown, chemically enhanced, genetically modified one please?

DC was right.  Too many tweets do make a twat.

So, Labour candidate in ‘bit of a knob’ shocker.  And, predictably, everyone from the Tories to the SNP to the Lib Dems are calling for his summary defenestration.  In the words of James Forsyth:

If Labour leave this candidate in place, then they’ll be saying that they think talking about wanting a ‘slave-grown’ banana is acceptable.

I hope that was written with an appropriately po-faced expression, though I don’t remember James being especially capable of that sort of thing at school (yes!  It’s another old-school tie conspiracy.  James Forsyth, Seumas Milne and I secretly control the media).  On the plus side, there’s lots more of these manufactured outrages to come.  Can’t wait.