UK PM tells party to tone down tweets
2013-03-13 15:03
London - British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned
his Conservative lawmakers not to air their grievances about the party's dismal
poll ratings and his leadership on Twitter, reports said on Wednesday.
Cameron and his new party strategist Lynton Crosby, who
helped Australia's John Howard win four elections, told Tory MPs they risked
damaging their prospects for the 2015 general election.
According to the Daily Mail newspaper, Cameron's office
said backbenchers were "participants, not commentators" after a
string of what it called "distracting" comments on the social media
website.
The Conservatives, the senior partners in a coalition
government with the centrist Liberal Democrats, slumped to 27% in a weekend
poll and came a humiliating third in a recent by-election that they had hoped
to win.
Combined with the continual economic gloom in Britain,
which risks entering a triple-dip recession, lawmakers are becoming
increasingly vocal in their criticisms of Cameron's leadership.
However, the prime minister's warning about Twitter
appeared to have fallen on deaf ears.
Lawmaker Sarah Woollaston, who has complained that
Cameron's inner circle is "too posh, male and white", took to Twitter
to reject the demands to keep quiet.
"I cannot 'participate' without the freedom to
'comment', even if that is sometimes inconvenient to the executive," she
tweeted.
She went on to express dismay at reports that the
government was planning to ditch plans to introduce a minimum price for
alcohol, saying it "would be a cheap, populist mistake".
