Are Twitter Tories ashamed to be Conservatives?
I do Twitter and I’ve noticed a strange trend… Let me explain…
Amongst the many, many, many, tweets that fly across my Twitter account are lots from MPs and I’ll usually hover over their name to see who exactly they are and I gradually started to notice a trend…
Labour MPs usually say “Labour MP for…” but Conservatives often just say “MP for…”. Some of them will infer that they are a Conservative by stating “Minister for [enter role, e.g. Screwing People’s Lives]”, or occasionally they will just have a background pic that infers that they are a Tory.
So I started a little (admittedly unscientific) experiment and set up a spreadsheet with all the MPs on Twitter (a list dragged off somewhere on t’interweb). Every time I saw a MP I’d look at their bio and record whether they said which party they belonged to, whether they inferred it by a job title, or whether they had a bio pic that showed which party.
The results are quite interesting…
Of 53 Tories I checked only 13 said they were a Conservative MP, and a further 14 inferred it by their role. Of 105 Labour MPs 91 said they were a Labour MP, 6 inferred it by their role, and 1 by their bio-pic.
In other words 93.3% of Labour MPs are happy for you to know that they are Labour but only 50.9% of Conservative MPs want you to know that they are Conservatives!
Other parties vary but generally commit to their party in their bio… I just wonder why Tories are so reluctant to admit they are Tories — are they embarrassed by their allegiance, or just because they don’t want to admit to agreeing with policies that cause so much damage to their constituents?
To clarify… this was a non-scientific snapshot… being a snapshot certain high-profile allegiance changes may not have been accurately captured… e.g. Chuka Umunna has been classified as an Independent (he was Labour, then Change UK, then Independent, and now (probably) LibDem — by the time you read this he may well be Shadow Minister for the Politically Homeless in the Monster Raving Looney Party!
