Labour names new 'Twitter tsar'
Updated on 17 August 2009
The Labour party has appointed Kerry McCarthy MP as its new media campaign spokesperson in the run-up to the general election.
The Bristol East MP said it would be the "first election where people don’t have to wait for politicians to come to them - to knock on the door, to deliver a leaflet or to do an interview".
"Voters will increasingly be searching the web to find out what we think about the issues, what we’ve actually been doing in the locality and looking to see what we sound like," she told supporters' and activists' site Labourlist. "That’s where YouTube comes in. All our candidates need to start building up that online collateral from now."
McCarthy was recently named as the most influential MP on Twitter by The Independent, based on a combination of followers, mentions and outgoing links to stories.
She was appointed to her new role, which will involve both co-ordinating and being the public face of Labour's new media efforts, by election co-ordinator Douglas Alexander.
"There’s an ever-growing interest in the new media area and so the party thought that there should be a politician involved in both the co-ordination and in being the public face of the great work the Labour party is doing in this area," she said.
McCarthy admitted that Gordon Brown's widely mocked appearance on YouTube in the middle of the MPs' expenses row was "not perfect".
"He chose to use video to speak direct to the public, which I think is very powerful. OK, maybe the execution wasn’t perfect but politicians need to keep using it and getting better," she said to Labourlist.
Last week, Gordon Brown added his voice to the #WeLoveTheNHS Twitter campaign, in which users of the micro-blogging site expressed their support for the NHS in the face of attacks on "socialised medicine" from US Republicans.
Comedy writer Graham Linehan, who started the campaign to counter some of American scare stories, last week told Channel 4 News that the "show of support can provide ammunition for those people who are fighting back against the scare stories in America".
Linehan described the PM's campaign contribution as "a bit embarrassing" and "political babble", although he praised wife Sarah Brown's attempt.
