By Kim Chisnall

He didn't so much tweet as make a twit out of himself.

UK Labour party candidate Stuart MacLennan in an extraordinary display of bad judgement let rip on his twitter pages with a series of offensive comments both about his fellow politicians and the people he expected to vote for him.

He called the elderly "coffin dodgers" and branded locals in the area he hoped to represent "chavs".

He called House of Commons speaker John Bercow a "t**t" and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg a "b******". He even insulted members of his own party, calling Labour MP Dianne Abbot, a "f******" idiot.

In less time than it takes to type 140 characters, MacLennan found himself sacked from the Labour Party and out of the running for the Moray constituency in Scotland.

In a statement MacLennan said that some of the things he tweeted were "very, very silly" and he was sorry that he'd let himself and his friends down.

In a column for the Telegraph, Toby Young argues that Twitter's most attractive characteristic is its out-of-school quality. "The fact that people are less guarded about what they tweet than what they say in public. That's what makes it such an intimate medium. It's more like someone whispering to you in a pub than bellowing across a crowded room."

No doubt that's how some people approach Twitter - think of the celebrities who seem to use it as some sort of digital holy confession.

But surely those that think Twitter is like whispering to your mates in the pub are deluded? Tapping away at the keyboard in the safety of your home feels like an intimate act but one you press "Tweet" your private missives become public property.

Even worse for the likes of MacLennan, tweets keep kicking around in cyberspace for ever. All of his offensive tweets were written months before he made the decision to stand as a political candidate but rather like how you can't "un-send" an email it's hard to take a tweet back.

If this is, as touted, Britain's first ever "e-election", MacLennan won't be the last to come a cropper from social media.