It was billed as the “internet election”, but almost all are agreed that didn’t really happen. However the social media battle between the three parties did heat up during the television debates and especially with Cleggmania. For all their talk, Labour became the “party of Twitter” for all the wrong reasons, losing a candidate and having an MP cautioned under the Representation of the Peoples Act for innovatively using Twitter to break election law. Facebook is where the most cut through from the Westminster bubble was achieved though:

Social media boffins Famecount have been comparing the state of the parties online over the last year and it seems the Tories came out on top in terms of Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. Despite the fair amount of flak picked up along the way, they spent plenty of cash online. Ed Miliband has some catching up to do, despite his near constant inane Twitter outpourings…

Fascinating insight into the mind of David Miliband in his rather loud interview. It seems he just can’t quite let the international stage go:

“Negotiating with my children makes negotiating with the Iranians seem like a doddle. At least the Iranians negotiate. These guys don’t even do that.”

The king over the water will be writing books next…

Ken Clarke faced a second weekend being briefed against in the Sundays. Guido can only presume the talk of reshuffle and booting Ken out is coming from an increasingly infuriated Coulson who doesn’t like to see Ministers being hounded by The Sun for being soft on crime. Very new politics.

Philip Hammond isn’t having a good time either. While admittedly snow is out of his control, after all the fuss the Tories made in opposition when divine intervention ruined a government media grid, you would have at thought at least some sort of contingency plan would have been thought up. The betting markets moved when the PMOS had to defend him this morning.

While it would be very hard for Dave to fire Ken Clarke, there’s bound to be a shot across his bow. Rumour is that his junior ministers, Crispin Blunt and Jonathan Djanogly and Lord McNally face the chop, with David Laws being lined up to come and shake up the department. A hang ‘em and flog ‘em Tory backbencher is also expected to be deployed to dilute “soft” Ken. Still no word on when Laws will receive his expected slap on the wrist from the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, but bad news for those who put their money on a return before Christmas…

Union boss Len McLusky says…

“The magnificent students’ movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped. We must not let the law paralyse us.”

The new boss of Unite, Len McCluskey has put both Dave and Ed in a tricky spot this morning. His Guardian piece is a boorishly militant call to arms, suggesting that the unions need to take a leaf out of the student protesters book and start smashing stuff up. Well he doesn’t quite say that, but phrases like “preparing for battle” “assault” and “developing our resistance” don’t leave much to the imagination.

Obviously this doesn’t bode well for the Prime Minister’s planned frosty beer and sandwiches  with the union bosses today, but the meeting was hardly going to be sweetness and laughter anyway. It’s Miliband that the article really backs into a corner though. Explicitly slamming New Labour for keeping Thatcher’s union controls and hinting that they want him to shift to the left, Ed has been forced to come out this morning against the very people who gave him his job:

“The language and tone of Len McCluskey’s comments are wrong and unhelpful and Ed Miliband will be making that clear when he meets him in the near future.”

So the purse-string holding unions that Ed schmoozed over the summer are teaming up with the extreme left “Coalition of Resistance”. The more centrist Parliamentary Labour Party, which on the whole didn’t vote for Ed, remains unconvinced by his performance thus far, as do big donors. Leaders of the Opposition need friends, not least on their own side.

When the going gets really tough, who exactly is Ed going to turn to for support?