Angus and Mearns Matters: 140 characters spell a sticky end for Paula Honey Rose

Brechin’s turning into a bit of a place for Monday musings.

After lamenting last week the loss of this summer’s Harley-Davidson rally it took barely enough time to blip the throttle before we learned that the mid-July hogfest will be going ahead after all – and crash helmets off to the band who have stepped in to save the spectacle.

But the latest rumblings in the cathedral city have nothing to do with the sound of a V-twin, rather the noisiness of local politics reverberating within the echo chamber of Twitter.

Elections to Angus Council are weeks away – we go to the ballot box on May 4 – and from the minute the starting gun was fired on the race for the Forfar chamber, the Brechin and Edzell ward marked itself out as one to watch.

Neither of the current SNP administration’s incumbents are standing for re-election so Nationalist hopes were being pinned on the pairing of Kenny Braes and Paul Wright.

However, it’s all turned into a bit of a social media sotter for the Nats as things have gone spectacularly wrong for Mr Wright.

A prolific user of the social media platform which gives users 140 characters to share their thoughts with everyone else out there on t’internet, Mr Wright – under the Twitter handle of Paula Honey Rose and the profile pic of a pair of saltire-adorned glittery high heels – became caught up in a storm over an old tweet involving extreme pornography censored with coffee cups.

His explanation was that he’d tweeted the vile image to demonstrate the character of another twitter use who had posted it on his feed.

That sort of excuse may be entirely consistent with the cesspit which Twitter often is – particularly where politics in general and the debate over Scottish independence in particular is concerned – but with one tweet from the 60,000 he’s posted, Paul, aka Paula, has jumped from the SNP before he was pushed.

His name will remain on the ballot paper as an SNP candidate since the deadline for changes has now passed, and local party chiefs have said they’ll make “abundantly clear” that he’s no longer one of their riders.

I suspect there’s a bit more to come on this stooshie, so perhaps Brechin may yet have more to give to Monday Matters.