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.