Trial by Twitter

"THE locks on the waterways of British history." Elections, as defined yesterday by pundit (and son of Malcolm) Hugo Rifkind.

QUESTION: What is meant by the headline "Sweeping changes to pension rules"? Answer: Grab all your loot today and you may end up sweeping.

MORNING walk in anorak. Afternoon gardening in shorts. Night-time in jim-jams and two duvets. This is how summer starts, with an eager sun but the air too thin to hold the heat for long. The weather forecasters seem to overlook the importance of the air thickening up. I blame the universities.

WE take tweeters far too seriously. A few years ago, if anyone accused an actor as popular as Roger Moore of being a racist, the national media would make sure they checked the credentials of whoever was making such a serious allegation. Social media has changed all that. A bunch of tweeters with names like Wazzle444 and Aryanwarrior decide Sir Roger is a racist, based on an interview he gave to a French magazine, and are somehow regarded as serious sources when they could well be no more than children, drunks or members of what we used to call the green-ink brigade. Something about computers and the internet makes us treat tweeters seriously in a way we never treated old-fashioned poison-pen writers. And so the story takes off and one of Britain's most distinguished actors, with a fine record of charity and disaster-relief work, is forced on the defensive by anonymous nobodies who denounce him as "an old racist" and "an ignorant old fool." My own policy on encountering tweeters, trolls and suchlike is to regard them as 14-year-old bedwetters using their mums' computers, until proven otherwise.

MEANWHILE, true to his word, Stephen Fry has not tweeted anything since February. The sky has not fallen in.

TONY Blair has popped up in this General Election campaign to sing the praises of Europe. This is the same Tony Blair who would have cheerfully dragged the UK into the euro and turned the Bank of England into a branch of the European Central Bank. Blair was stopped, thank the Lord, by Gordon Brown who never gets the praise he deserves for saving the pound.

SO what's the difference between our lacklustre, uninspiring politicians and the dazzling little firebrand that is Nicola Sturgeon? What makes her so cool, composed, so focused? Can it be that, unlike all the party leaders she is pitched against in debates, Sturgeon is not standing for election on May 7? She is the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party but she is not a candidate.

AND while I admire her style, her sentiments are scary. If it is lucky, the SNP will get about one million votes, all in Scotland. The Tories will probably get about 10 million votes, including about 400,000 in Scotland. So when Nicola Sturgeon talks of using her Scottish SNP MPs to "lock the Tories out of Downing Street," she is celebrating the tyranny of the few over the many. Not what most of us understand by democracy, is it?

THE lush grass of spring is enjoyed by cattle, sheep – and, strangely enough, by cats. I find our tabby blissfully nibbling on a succulent green blade, extracting the juice with his side-teeth, like a Cuban tobacco baron enjoying a particularly fine cigar. Experts tell us cats eat grass to obtain enzymes or to clear furballs but that hardly accounts for the expression of pure bliss on an old moggie's face. Any ideas?