The first Twitter civil war in British politics

Some of us have been through it before: Labour politicians shouting at each other and calling each other names. Now they're doing it on social media

Labour MPs, yesterday, by Hieronymus Bosch

Some of us have been through it before: Labour politicians shouting at each other and calling each other names. So it was like the good times when John Mann harangued Ken Livingstone for being a Nazi apologist and an effing disgrace.

What is different this time, though, is social media. It is a mark of the breakdown in Labour discipline that in the past week three MPs have attacked colleagues on Twitter.

First John Woodcock, pro-Trident MP for Barrow, had a go at Clive Lewis, anti-Trident MP for Norwich South:

Woodcock was objecting to an interview in the Eastern Daily Press in which Lewis went back over an argument when he swore at Woodcock during the Syria air strikes vote and for which he had made a limited apology. “I think sometimes tactics of intimidation and aggression work in highly stressful situations. There are people who think if they push certain buttons you will respond in a certain way,” he said.

Then Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West, lost her patience with the attempt by Richard Burgon, the Corbynite MP, to blame Labour's failure in the Scottish elections on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown:

(The two have previous: two months ago, she made a face when Burgon asked a question in the Commons.)

And then there was the flare-up yesterday between John McDonnell, shadow chancellor and second most important person in the Labour government-in-waiting, and Caroline Flint, who, like Reeves and Woodcock, refuses to serve on Labour's front bench:

This time, though, it was the Corbynite who lost self-control on Twitter. Flint's responses were measured:

I make that three-nil to the true left-wingers: the ones who want a Labour government, not a protest movement.