After a day of bad PR, Boris Johnson has reverted the @mayoroflondon Twitter account to the Mayoralty and decamped to the @BackBoris2012 campaign account and, presumably, the currently empty @borisjohnson.
I confess, I initially didn’t think the change was a big issue.
But then I thought about all the City Hall arranged, taxpayer funded photo-ops where GLA employees update the Twitter account, and reconsidered.
Everyone knows Boris doesn’t tweet himself.
It’s physically impossible for him to tweet pictures of himself taken from the back of a room he’s speaking in, while still speaking. And we can be pretty sure it wasn’t really him professing a desire for David Starkey to be his uncle.
But whoever updates the account, the people who followed it did so because they were interested in their city’s government. Not because they wanted to receive political campaign material.
When the Telegraph contacted the Information Commissioner’s office it became impossible for even his most loyal defender to claim it was just a lefty-generated row.
Besides wondering when he first became aware of the changes and the bad PR they generated, I also feel a little sorry for Boris.
On the first day of the campaign he re-established a convincing lead over Ken Livingstone, a feat which should have been the dominant story.
Team Boris’s own cack-handedness ensured it wasn’t.
Instead the campaign starts with a warning to candidates not to point the guns at their own feet.
