Both Labour and the Tories have previously denied coordinating their MPs and activists use of Twitter and other forms of social media. Guido has long suspected they were bluffing; not least because Peter Hain doesn’t even bother to change the ‘Line to Take’ tweets before putting them out, and many Tories have been caught out sending  mysteriously similar and very on message tweets before. Now Guido has seen an email sent via the Government Whips to Tory MPs from the Digital Team at CCHQ that lets the cat out of the bag.

The email, sent less than an hour ago, coughs:

“At CCHQ we run an internal email list to notify people when tweets have gone out from @david_cameron or if anything high priority has gone out from @conservatives, so that they are aware of our comms and can retweet to share with their followers if they wish. Please let us know if you would like to be added to this list and what email address you would like these notifications to be sent to.”

Further to that, CCHQ are still trying to get the basics across to their less technologically able MPs with Twitter training from the company itself. It also looks like their more unruly and outspoken members are being brought in for a sinister sounding session on “compliance”:

“Twitter will be running two training sessions for MPs in the next couple of months (dates tbc) at the House of Commons as part of the series we are holding commencing with one on Compliance next Monday. There will be two different sessions, designed for different levels of experience – ‘beginner setup’ and ‘improving existing accounts’. More details will follow, however please do let us know if you’d like to register an interest in one of these sessions.”

They are coming for you Mike Fabricant!

UPDATE: Phew! Fabricant says far from being silenced he is in fact organising the sessions:

This is very funny especially the tag line at end! 'Cos I am organising both sessions!! (Compliance is legal stuff). http://t.co/awyYHnBuBP

— Michael Fabricant 🇬🇧🇮🇱🇺🇦 (@Mike_Fabricant) March 7, 2013

He didn’t deny the coordination of MPs tweets though…