AS Oscar Wilde might have said, to lose one politician to internet site Bebo may be regarded as misfortune; to lose another looks like carelessness. For the second time during this Scottish Parliament election, a political party has discovered a drawback to recruiting teenagers as candidates. Just weeks after the Lib-Dem’s Motherwell & Wishaw hopeful Stuart Douglas was pictured legless on his message board, Tory hopeful Ross Thomson has seen his chances dashed after letting his guard down online. Journalists looking to uncover dirt on politicians now don’t need to spend hours tailing them or shivering on stakeouts, they just have to run a cursor over a webpage. This may not be a problem for the more seasoned, middle-aged campaigner, who in all probability doesn’t even know how to switch a computer on. Or, more likely, has a flunky to do it. But when parties select a teenage student to fight a no-hope seat, they perhaps need to realise that teenage students get drunk, take pictures of themselves doing it, make inappropriate comments...and then put it all up for the whole world to see on social networking sites like Bebo. And what exactly are our universities teaching these youngsters, supposedly our brightest and our best. Ross Thomson is in the second year of a Politics and International Relations degree at Aberdeen University. Did he fall asleep during the lecture about it being a bad idea for a Conservative candidate to crack jokes about Britain ruling the Republic of Ireland once more and making the population slaves? Student japes are all well and good, but when you are standing for election in the town with the largest Irish community in Scotland, perhaps a little bit more discretion would have been called for. Thomson also revels in exposing US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton as a communist, and any neo-con would be put to shame with his apparent answer to Iran’s nuclear ambition. Just drop a bomb on them first. A nuclear one, naturally. And what’s his message to the unemployed? Why, to get on their bike, of course. Presumably this is not official Conservative Party policy. He also posts a number of pictures poking fun at liberalism, abortion and gay marriage. In all likelihood he does have reasoned opinions on these subjects, after all, he has delivered a lecture on drugs and crime to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference. The truth is though, that sometimes teenage boys will just act like teenage boys. And sometimes, teenage boys do silly things on the internet. | 
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