Calm down, it’s a joke

I have never been a contributor to Twitter, partly because my comments would not be subjected to the intensive hygiene and cleanliness vetting which goes on here, for example. Instead it would all spew out untreated and lumpily noisome, like a Thames Water pipe on to your nearest beach, and I would be toast within about 60 minutes. There are other reasons – it seems to me a convocation of obsessive, perpetually furious morons, plus I loathe its modernity in reducing the discussion of complex issues into 75 words of bile, usually ending ‘just like Hitler’ – but self-preservation is the main one.

I am told that it would have been advantageous to be tweeting every hour that God sends during my campaign to be elected in Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland – it would have given me a ‘reach’, apparently. But only a reach into Twitterland: I do not want those people’s votes. I know that one shouldn’t be picky about one’s voters, but I am. I have already banned two constituents from voting for me after they spouted idiocies on my Facebook page. I want those who vote for me to feel they are part of a very select few – and that, luckily, is exactly how it has turned out.

My sympathy for people who get themselves into trouble because of something they have tweeted, then, is a bit thinnish. And all the more so when the person in question is the writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch. I think it’s fair to say David and I are not close friends. I find him a smug, self-righteous, pompous bore when in the flesh. When on paper, he is somehow a different creature and I always enjoyed his columns even when disagreeing with them.