The Dumbest Tweet of the 2017 election campaign is over before it started - step forward, Labour MP Chuka Umunna

Poor old Chuka's in a right tizz. I think he may need someone to put a blanket over his shoulders, make him a nice cup of tea, and sit with him for a bit. In case you've forgotten the chap, Chuka Umunna was Labour's future once - for all of 30 seconds - before doing a volte-face and declaring that he wouldn't be a candidate in the Labour leadership contest. Presumably he and his other Blairite chums have been busy plotting ways to defenestrate poor old Steptoe and replace him with one of their own in time for the 2020 general election - only for Theresa May to pull the rug out from under them by bringing it forward by three years. And the Blairites just aren't ready. Sickening, I imagine. The Labour Party's resident nightclubbin' metropolitan lounge lizard vented his spleen on Twitter this morning...

...by posting one of the weirdest, most incoherent, illogical tweets that's ever appeared in my timeline:

I've looked at that over, under, sideways, down - and I simply can't make any sense of it. Calling an election is anti-democratic? Fighting an election against opposition parties is rejecting the idea of an opposition? Calling a fair and free election in what is arguably the most democratic country in the world is an attempt to turn it into a dictatorship? I thought of that line from the film, The Lives of Others: "To think people like you once ruled a country."

Mind you, I may have been a bit hasty in awarding the dumbest tweet prize to Umunna, given that the philosopher A.C. Grayling hasn't got properly into his stride yet. Once he's put his underpants on his head, stuck two pencils up his nostrils and said "Wibble!" a lot, he may come up with something every bit as illogical as Chuka's effort. For now, he's just limbering up:

I'm not altogether convinced that A.C. isn't getting mixed up between "we" and "I" here, or that being a professional philosopher gives you a unique insight into the views of the British people - especially when opinion polls suggest that support for Brexit is currently standing at 55%. Or is he taking "we" to mean "highly-educated Londoners who think like me"? And why would it require gall to assert something which all the evidence would suggest is, you know, true? But, despite all that, it doesn't come near to matching Umunna's demented effort. Still, there are many weeks to go, and I have a suspicion Grayling may yet pip Chuka at the post.

After Mrs. May's little bombe surprise, I watched 20 minutes of Commons coverage yesterday afternoon. Bludgeoned by a succession of spectacularly stupid contributions from opposition MPs, I'll admit I wasn't paying full attention when a female Labour MP actually asked whether, by naming 8th June as the date of the general election, Mrs. May hadn't "pre-empted the will of the British people" - i.e. she should just have asked MPs to vote on whether to hold an election, without attaching a date to it. Whoever said this (I was too busy rocking back and forth on the sofa, clutching my head and moaning to check) doesn't actually rule a country - but thousands of electors must have voted for her. Scary. I had to listen to many Commons debates in the four years leading up the 1997 election, and I'm pretty sure MPs (with one or two obvious exceptions) were't nearly this stupid twenty years ago. If they were, they were certainly more adept at hiding it.

One last thought: if Labour seriously want to stave off electoral disaster, I urge them to limit Diane Abbott's media appearances - probably to zero.