A 24-year-old Labour candidate in Scotland who once said "the biggest gaffes will likely be made by candidates on Twitter - what are the odds it'll be me?" should have put some money on himself. Stuart MacLennan's tweets included "God this fairtrade, organic banana is shit. Can I have a slave-grown, chemically enhanced, genetically modified one please?", "Made my connecting train. No first class it would appear. Sitting opposite the ugliest old boot I've ever seen too" and "Lots of chavs at Stirling station".
At first I thought his password had been set to something entirely unguessable like "StuartMacLennan1" and his account taken over by some one who would inevitably be called a "hacker". But no - he has issued an apology, saying "I have let myself down and am really sorry". Labour has - for now - said he is "foolish" (but appears to have made no moves to deselect him).
What is remarkable, however, is that none of MacLennan's Twitter followers within Labour were reading and advising him that it was inappropriate for a prospective parliamentary candidate to, for example, call elderly voters "coffin dodgers" (even if he had no hope of winning in SNP-held Moray). This isn't recent behaviour: the banana tweet was from July, the chav tweet from September, the train tweet from December. The swearing alone - writing "You've got to be fucking kidding me" when Barack Obama won the Nobel peace prize - should have made someone in the party notice before now.
His account has been suspended but Paul Waugh's Evening Standard blog has screengrabs of the offending tweets, including that one about the banana. He also coins the phrase "First Twitter suicide of the election."
Midday update: MacLennan has been sacked by Scottish Labour.
