My view on the "scum-sucking pigs" Twitter debacle

The current reverberations echoing around the Blogosphere and Twittersphere about the Labour MP David Wright's alleged Twitter transgression where he is said to have described Tories as "scum-sucking pigs" is in my view being blown out of all proportion. This is what he is alleged to have written:

#ivenevervotedtory because you can put lipstick on a scum-sucking pig, but it's still a scum-sucking pig. And cos they would ruin Britain.

Some Tory Twitterers and bloggers have reacted angrily to this and demanded an apology. For his part, Mr Wright has tried to claim that he never wrote the scum-sucking parts and that someone has hacked into his account to edit his original tweet (which has since been deleted although cached copies still exist). Frankly his claims about someone hacking into his account do not seem very robust. As far as I know, tweets cannot be edited once they have become part of the Twitter timeline.

Eric Pickles, the Tory party chairman has also waded in writing a letter demanding an apology from Mr Wright. Am I alone in thinking that Mr Pickles' time could be much better spent?

To be honest, I cannot really see what all the fuss is about. Yes, Mr Wright's use of language was ill-advised and his attempts to distance himself from the worst part of it do not seem to stand up to scrutiny. However we are in the run up to an election. The #ivenevervotedtory and #ivenevervotedlabour hashtags were being used by hundreds of people yesterday on Twitter to throw insults at each other. The febrile atmosphere is bound to throw things like this up. Are we going to have senior politicians from every "wronged" party wading into every single one of these little transgressions?

Last month, as I blogged about at the time, Greg Stone the Lib Dem PPC for Newcastle East was forced to stand down after he made a few ill-advised remarks about some of his opponents on a live-chat. I thought that was an overreaction too.

Can we please stop the focus on these spats? I don't think I can cope with 3 or 4 more months of this sort of thing!