Ellie Gellard’s trip from Twitter to Telegraph

Young Labour supporter Ellie Gellard may have set some kind of benchmark for political flash-in-the-pans – in this election campaign, at least -  after she was plucked from the obscurity of the blogsphere to launch the Labour manifesto.
 
The 21-year-old student at Bristol University came to the attention of the party thanks to her enthusiastic use of Twitter (using the soubriquet Bevanite Ellie), where she has more than 3,500 followers, and her blog 'The Stilettoed Socialist'.
 
Yesterday Gellard (above, with Sarah and Gordon Brown), who also volunteers at Labour HQ, emerged blinking from the digital world, clad in a short, red cocktail dress, and into the full glare of the traditional media.
 
Acting as Gordon Brown's warm-up act at the manifesto launch, she spoke about her area of expertise - the young generation of first-time voters reared on the internet - and how Labour could use sites like Facebook to win the election through "word of mouth".
 
Her appearance created what the BBC's technology correspondent Rory-Cellan Jones described as a "Twitter-hurricane" as users of the site all had their say on everything from her politics to her shoes to her social background (she went to a well-to-do Roman Catholic comprehensive in west London and studies French at university).
 
It also exposed the perils of posting your every thought online. Immediately after her appearance, her 18,000-odd Tweets and several years’ worth of blog posts were subjected to forensic analysis in the hope of finding something controversial.
 
Soon enough it emerged that she had strayed badly off-message in 2008, when she had called on the man she was now sitting with, Gordon Brown, to resign after the Glasgow East by-election debacle.
 
That in turn led to her picture being splashed across the front page of the Telegraph and in several other papers, while the Daily Mail also latched onto a snarky comment she once made about Lady Thatcher falling down the Number Ten stairs on a skateboard. (It didn’t happen, but she suggested it might be amusing if it did.)
 
But as the excitement abated, and Gellard returned to her Tweets, it was left to Jones of the Beeb to ponder on his blog: "Did it all matter, had some great issue of political significance been at stake here? No, but it had all been a bit more fun than working out what anybody is really going to do about the deficit." ·