George Osborne challenges Ed Balls to Twitter popularity contest

George Osborne has declared he is in competition with the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, over who can get the most followers on Twitter.

A day after joining the microblogging site, using the Twitter handle George-Osborne, the chancellor had racked up 33,400 followers despite sending just three tweets. Balls has sent more than 3,000 tweets and has 77,500 followers.

"We're in a competition now," Osborne told ITV1's Daybreak on Thursday morning. He said of his introduction to the Twittersphere, on a day when it could be argued that he had more pressing matters to deal with: "I confess I didn't spend most of the day doing it. I did a couple of tweets. I'm getting used to it. But it's a fast and furious world out there."

The chancellor was bombarded with tweets. Comedian David Schneider suggested Osborne should cut Twitter's 140-character limit on message length to 135 characters, with an exemption for those with more than 200,000 followers, to avoid driving them abroad, while David Keen suggested "a tax on budget U-turns".

Lord Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, tweeted: "One personal plea. Please don't introduce a tax on tweets. It'll ruin me."

Osborne's profile says he will be helped in running the account by the Conservatives' media team, arousing suspicions that party officials will play a bigger role updating the account than the chancellor.

Osborne also told Daybreak he was surprised to see a mocked-up image of himself as Lady Thatcher on the front page of the Daily Mail with the headline: "The laddie's not for turning".

He said the image made him "choke on my toast and Marmite this morning".
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What does he think he's on about the stupid idiot. He must be on a wind up or something.
When did he think it would be ok to think, ha thats it. Budgets out of the day. Now let's have a twitter war.

 

Now thats ironic!

 

And in popularity contest number 2 we have...

Hepatitis C v HIV.