Trendy? No, using Twitter makes our leaders look more vacuous than they are already
HOURS before his Budget speech, George Osborne unleashed his first tweet upon the world, proclaiming that he ‘would present a budget that tackles the economy’s problems head on’ and help those ‘who want to work hard and get on’.
Wow! You can imagine his spin doctors persuading him to open a Twitter account so that he could deliver this bombshell. David Cameron does it. So does the Pope. And Rupert Murdoch. And the Royal Family. The Chancellor of the Exchequer must join in. Connect with the people.
Evidently he’s learned quickly. His debut had many of the characteristics of public figures who tweet. It was boring. It revealed absolutely nothing. And it was almost certainly not written by him.
When you are putting the finishing touches to a make-or-break Budget speech, and having an anxious last word with the Chief Secretary, you don’t have time to tweet. It was probably done by one of the savvy female advisers who tend to his needs.
So we have a vacuous tweet which almost certainly wasn’t even written by the public personage who purported to send it. What on earth is the point of that?
Or of David Cameron’s tweet after the Budget? ‘Help for an Aspiration Nation in tough times from George Osborne. Good news on deficit, housing, beer, petrol and tax.’ He would say that, wouldn’t he? Is it very dignified, coming from a Prime Minister? I’m sure he didn’t write it either.
I’m not particularly getting at them. The last Pope and the new one are in some ways just as bad. Pope Benedict XVI started tweeting last December, doubtless urged on by trendy young advisers who wanted the 85-year-old ex-Pontiff to relate to yoof.
He certainly dug deep. One of his valedictory tweets ( his Twitter account has since been wiped clean by Vatican lackeys) was: ‘In these momentous days, I ask you to pray for me and for the Church, trusting always in divine Providence.’
Benedict is said to be one of the greatest theologians who has ever lived. You wouldn’t guess it from his tweets. Twitter reduces all of its practitioners to the banal.
Pope Francis I (who already has more than two million followers) has picked up Benedict’s baton with gusto. ‘ True power is service,’ he tweeted on Tuesday. ‘The Pope must serve all people, especially the poor, the weak, the vulnerable.’ Hold the front page!
THE media mogul Rupert Murdoch is another frequent tweeter. He recently reprimanded one of his editors via Twitter, but most of his tweets are as interesting as the bucolic ruminations of a farmer leaning on a five-bar gate. For example: ‘Having a great day babysitting youngest daughter while Wendi takes Grace scout camping!’
Murdoch-watchers suggest that, unusually among public figures, he probably does his own tweeting because there are so many misprints.
As a tweeter, Mr Murdoch is about halfway between politicians and churchmen, who tweet to advance a cause, and the celebrity tweeters who bang on endlessly (and to my mind usually tiresomely) about themselves. Two examples of this genre are the actor Stephen Fry ( with more than five- and- ahalf million followers) and the footballer Wayne Rooney (almost six million).
Such wit and learning as Mr Fry possesses are seldom evident. After the death of the actor Frank Thornton was announced on Monday, Mr Fry tweeted: ‘Oh how sad. So long Frank Thornton. He was wonderful in ‘Me and My Girl’ in the 80s when I got to know him . . . Of course RIP xxx.’ Some eulogy!
As for Mr Rooney, he may be even more narcissistic, and is certainly more imbecilic. Two days ago he tweeted: ‘Looking forward to meet up with England tonight. 2 massive games.’
Famous tweeters strive not to reveal much about themselves, though as in the case of Mr Rooney, they sometimes do so inadvertently, at which point it becomes interesting.
The black Labour MP David Lammy recently castigated the BBC on Twitter for making a ‘silly innuendo’ about the race of the next Pontiff. When a BBC reporter asked whether the smoke coming from the Sistine Chapel would be black or white, the not necessarily very bright Mr Lammy misheard, thinking that the journalist had been speculating about the colour of the next Pope’s skin.
You will have gathered I am no great fan of Twitter, though I do concede that one of its few recommendations is that it shows us that famous people, whom we might otherwise have respected, have even more banal and hal f - witted thoughts than we do ourselves.
Well, it’s a free country, and if people want to tweet about themselves, and others want to follow them, so be it. I only observe that the act of tweeting generally makes well-known or prominent people appear even more vacuous than they already are.
MORE significantly, there is the element of manipulation on the part of public figures. I’m sure David Cameron and George Osborne and Pope Francis have been told that by tweeting they are getting closer to ordinary people.
In fact, the opposite is the case. I suppose it might be possible to be candid and informative within the confines of the 140 characters permitted by Twitter, though it would be well-nigh impossible to be profound.
But such elite tweeters are not merely interesting in telling us about themselves or their causes. A form of communication intended to appear friendly, even intimate, is in fact calculated to reduce the truth to serving propaganda.
Moreover, although followers can pitch in and disagree, it is most unlikely there will be an open debate. George Osborne makes his preposterous ex cathedra statement, but he is not required to justify it, nor is he examined in any depth, as he would be if he unburdened himself in the traditional media.
By the way, I do acknowledge that Twitter can play a useful straightforward informative role, as it did during the Egyptian uprising in the Arab Spring. In that context, social media provided avenues of communication which the authorities could not prevent.
The London Evening Standard mistakenly used Twitter yesterday to tell its followers some of the contents of the Budget before Mr Osborne had got up to speak in the Commons. There was no secret agenda there. Although it was a silly mistake, at least it was an honest one.
But the political class and many public figures are not for the most part using Twitter to inform or enlighten. They pretend to be reaching out to us, but become only more aloof.
Twitter does not bring us together. It actually widens the gulf between rulers and the ruled. In the hands of a Wayne Rooney it may be relatively harmless, if boring. Used repeatedly by unscrupulous politicians, Twitter will end up being anything but democratic.
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