Emily Thornberry: The Marie Antoinette of Twitter

MP Emily Thornberry scored an own goal by tweeting a picture of a white van driver’s house draped in England flags.

All eyes were on the Tories in the run-up to the Rochester by-election last week (which delivered a second Westminster seat to Ukip). That was, until MP Emily Thornberry turned the fire back on to Labour by tweeting a picture of a white van driver's house draped in England flags.

It's quite hard to "come up with a more lethal tweet" to send to Labour's core vote on pollingday, says Anne Perkins inThe Guardian. Labour leader Ed Miliband hastily fired her, which "smacked of both weakness and fury", says Mary Riddell inThe Daily Telegraph. But this "Marie Antoinette of social messaging" may have given him the "jolt" he needs by illuminating the "chasm between workers and their traditional party". Voters do not "seek carbon copies of themselves".

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Emily Hohler
Politics editor

Emily has worked as a journalist for more than thirty years and was formerly Assistant Editor of MoneyWeek, which she helped launch in 2000. Prior to this, she was Deputy Features Editor of The Times and a Commissioning Editor for The Independent on Sunday and The Daily Telegraph. She has written for most of the national newspapers including The Times, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, The Evening Standard and The Daily Mail, She interviewed celebrities weekly for The Sunday Telegraph and wrote a regular column for The Evening Standard. As Political Editor of MoneyWeek, Emily has covered subjects from Brexit to the Gaza war.

Aside from her writing, Emily trained as Nutritional Therapist following her son's diagnosis with Type 1 diabetes in 2011 and now works as a practitioner for Nature Doc, offering one-to-one consultations and running workshops in Oxfordshire.