‘MPs turn to Twitter to talk to voters’ shouts the headline on the Daily Telegraph site today.  If the august, if conservative (small ‘c’) columns of the Telegraph are saying it then it must be so.  Well it aint.   Yes there are lots of MPs on Twitter now, if you call just over a hundred out of 646 MPs a lot.

Taking its most of the stats from Tweetminster the Telegraph also notes that John Prescott has over 13,000 followers (at the time of publication it was actually slightly under).  Hardly enough to guarantee  a Labour landslide.   With months to go before the US presidential election the candidates were counting their online support in terms of many hundreds of thousands.  Most MP candidates have a few hundred followers.  In fact @Election10 beats a lot of them hands down.   The online influence of bloggers like Guido is far greater than any MP or parliamentary prospect.

There are only weeks to go and whilst the web will undoubtedly play a bigger part than ever before it’s not the MPs who will be setting the agenda, least of all with their paltry twitter followings.