Today, someone pointed out to me the Twitter feed of the Lib Dem PPC for Mid Beds and I have to say, I was a just a little shocked. Foolishly, before I saw it for myself, I defended her.

Readers of my blog will know I am not the worlds best speller. My grammar is often found wanting and lack of time is always my worst enemy. It doesn’t help when you are writing your blog stood on the train balancing your lap top on someone else’s head, either.

However, all of that aside, I defended the Lib Dem PPC because the comments we have received are about how awful her writing/spelling is and how can it be that someone who writes so badly could aspire to be an MP?

“Hang on" said I, you only have 140 characters on Twitter, so give her a break, “she is probably just trying to get a lot of information into a restricted medium and using short cuts”.

How wrong was I? Her shorter Tweets are the most embarrassing. Frankly, much of it is hard to decipher at all.

An example of some of the words/abbreviations she has used - cudnt, brd, bin, wont b der, becoz, mng, showin, wen, shld av, wot.

“Maybe she’s trying to get down with the kids?”, said I.

 So we showed the Twitter feed to the kids.

I can’t repeat what they said on here. The least offensive comments focused on the sadness of people in ‘my generation’ trying to be cool when we just aren’t. Gulp, that even hurt me a little.

My position on this? Being able to at least try to get it right and maintain the educational standards we would like the ‘kids’ to aspire to is a minimum obligation for anyone who is, or is aspiring to be an MP.

The English language is beautiful. The use of words and language and the ability to express opinion and thought is a joy. It is not something anyone seeking office should denigrate or abuse.

I end this with the observation that I don’t want a deluge of emails pointing out what was spelt wrong in this blog! I'm balancing this on a very nice man's head!