no one was close, no one was distant

Labour's ''Twitter tsar'' was deluged with daft questions from users of the micro-blogging site after comedian Ross Noble launched a ''Twitterbombard''
campaign.

Noble urged his 30,000 Twitter ''followers'' to send crazy queries to Kerry McCarthy's site to see how the MP who fronts Labour's new media campaigning would respond.

And the comedian was forced to say ''fair play'' after the Bristol East MP – who has been named as the most influential parliamentarian on Twitter and has almost 4,300 followers of her own – announced she would try to reply to as many of the tweets as possible.


Asked if she would wear a gorilla suit to Parliament, she replied: ''I don't think
it's expressly forbidden, I could give it a try?''

When a fellow vegan asked her to recommend a cheese substitute, she said: ''I prefer Cheezley though Sheese sometimes has its uses and the soft Scheese is good.''

And challenged to start a Mexican wave in the Commons chamber, she joked: ''We do it on the Labour benches when Nick Clegg is speaking. You just don't see it
happening.''

Hats off to KerryMP, friendly and funny is good PR, and yet .......

We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now.

Is that necessarily a good thing my friends?