The revolution will not be tweeted

Don’t listen to the hype about ‘Web 2.0’ politics, says Andrew Gilligan. Online campaigning is only of interest to a handful of Westminster nerds and journalists

Ed Balls has ‘had to take the roast chicken out of the oven’. For Sarah Brown, ‘waking up in our house in Fife was today’s special treat’. William Hague is ‘enjoying a good Burger King at Wetherby services’, and the breaking news from Eric Pickles is that he is ‘out with the team in Brentwood’. In the general election as it appears on Twitter — or should that be Pooter? — there can be no doubt that the battle of ideas is well and truly joined.

Questioning the importance of the ‘Web 2.0 campaign’ has, of course, become as outrageous an assault on the conventional wisdom as, say, challenging gay marriage. But I need to break this to you: contrary to the panting predictions of a thousand middle-aged hacks desperate to look with-it, this will not be the Twitter or Facebook election.

Twitter, in particular, has managed something really quite miraculous — to come up with content even more banal than the rest of the campaign. And the public has, it seems, noticed. Mr Balls, said by the Observer to be ‘the Cabinet’s most prolific tweeter’, has a grand total of 6,668 Twitter followers, roughly half the circulation of the Dawlish Gazette. Mr Hague manages 3,681. Gordon Brown last week spent an hour of his precious campaigning time doing a webcast to 310 viewers.

Last week Tweetminster, a website which tracks political trends on Twitter, produced the first ‘poll’ in about two years which actually had Labour ahead of the Tories, by 35 to 34 per cent, and forecast a Labour overall majority of 14 seats. The projection was based on the touching belief — allegedly supported by Japanese research — that those candidates with the greatest number of mentions on Twitter are most likely to win.