Members of UK Parliament Have Been Given Guidelines on How to Tweet

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

The adult humans in charge of our country have been issued with a 5,500-word etiquette guide to tweeting, according to a Sun on Sunday report. Let that sink in for a minute: The people who govern everything we do—every person we let into the country, our status as one unit on the greater whole of a continent, how much tax we pay, what the living wage is—these people need a 5,500-word primer before they can send a tweet, in case they fuck it up so spectacularly they have to quit their job over a photo of a patriotic van. These people have the keys to our nukes and their fingers on the button. They cannot be trusted not to fav pornographic tweets sent from anonymous accounts.

Commons Speaker John Bercow issued the report to MPs new and old this week, with advice including: "It's sensible never to tweet when drunk!" and: "Only tweet when you have something interesting or worthwhile to say." The report pulled the MPs close and whispered, "Tweet about things normal people are interested in, like music, sport, films, and TV." The report coddled them in a blanket and said: "But make it genuine, don't fake an interest in your local football team or Coronation Street if that's not your thing."

Some points of interest:

i. Sorry, fucking first up, can we examine the phrase "normal people" buried quietly within the above? You know normal people, don't you, with their football and their Coronation Street. They like their soaps, the normal people, don't they? Like their football. They like anything on a TV screen, really, the scrotes; the commoners; the vermin. Have you ever seen a film? Try talking to a normal person about it, they love all that shit. Some example conversation starters: "Eyup, what about Ant-Man?"; "Les Battersby"; "Did you see that goal by Old Wazza? Old Wayne Rooney?"; "Eeeeeeeee: films and TV."

ii. To reiterate, this report lasted 5,500 words. As a man who once wrote 3,000 words about "how not to be a dick on the Tube"—a man to whom word counts are a simple hurdle on the 400m track ahead of a marathon; a man to whom word counts aren't even advice, just an echoing sound that get in the way of me fully indulging in the nine-month ego trip that has been my employment as a staff writer; a man who just wrote a 109-word sentence about word counts, word counts rendered a meta-concept now, a word-count-within-a-word-count—please know: even I think that's too fucking long.

iii. Watching MPs commit seppuku on their own tweets is like watching your headmaster do a fun dance at the end-of-year talent contest: horrible, unwatchable, a human car-crash buckling in upon itself; but also a brief glimpse at the monster within, a rhythmless reminder that we all live, we all die, we all have flaws and are human.

iv. Our MPs are inept lizard people who cannot send a fucking tweet without guidance. I mean, fucking hell—truly we are doomed.

In fairness to the new set of guidelines, it's not like MPs don't have form for extremely fucking up on social media: Ed Balls, for instance, did that Ed Balls thing, which I would be inclined to say was deliberate if he hadn't done it four years ago, before social media self-awareness truly took off, before #brands started engaging in rap battles with one another, before the first nails in the body of humanity were hammered through the palms and into the firm wood of the cross.

Remember also: Emily Thornberry having to resign after taking a photo of a van; or Simon Danczuk's "Fav if #tacky RT if #classy", a now seminal tweet, a roller coaster of a tweet, every human emotion—jealousy, fear, rage, a sudden vacuum of joy, general anger about a low-level gym group offering affordable subscriptions on the front of Karen Danczuk's trunk—distilled into one perfect whole, the instruction "Fav if #tacky RT if #classy" both classy and tacky, the concept of irony engulfing itself in 114 short characters like an ouroboros, this tweet his Galloway-and-the-cream moment.

Do we want this, or do we not want this? Because I know I enjoyed watching Simon Danczuk body himself into oblivion; Danczuk going full Danczuk on himself; Danczuk the monk on his knees and this tweet his gasoline; Danczuk just kneeling there, a single lit match in his hand, kneeling there and shouting: "I'LL DO IT, KAREN, I'LL FUCKING DO IT."

But I also very much did not enjoy it and would rather this stop.

I suppose the balance here is: do we want our MPs to be fragile and flawed and human, or do we want our MPs to be automatons, the fleshy filling in a suit-and-expense-account sandwich, robo-wankers issuing missives from on high? Because when you zoom out and think about it, there is no good answer: on one side of the spectrum you have Simon Danczuk eyelessly chatting on a sofa about his divorce, and on the other hand you have David Cameron going studs up on foxes and seagulls. Truly, there is no winner. The only loser is us.

Follow Joel on Twitter.