Twitter says it's all Nick Clegg's fault in ironic swipe at newspapers

It's all Nick Clegg's fault. That fake tan that went wrong, Samantha Cameron's pregnancy, that ladder in your tights ... Twitter would appear, if one were to take it at face value, to have decided that the Liberal Democrat leader is the source of many of the world's woes.

However, it's nothing of the sort; instead it was the reaction by denizens of the rapid-fire social network to the stories on the front of not one, but four of today's Tory-backing newspapers which appear to suggest that Clegg is not a worthy recipient of a vote.

By midday it was the second most-tweeted hashtag on Twitter, second only to Earth day; in the UK it was the top hashtag, indicating that thousands of tweets incorporated it every hour.

The trigger was the perfect storm of media coverage attacking Clegg: the Daily Mail saying he had insulted British pride, the Daily Telegraph pointing to payments for a parliamentary assistant made into Clegg's personal account (a fact which the story included – though very far down the story), the Sun accusing him of flip-flopping on foreign and immigration policy, and the Express claiming he "wants jobs for asylum seekers".

Twitter users, perhaps aware that the newspapers might – as former Sun editor David Yelland pointed out earlier this week – not be entirely unbiased, reacted by creating the hashtag: if one could blame Clegg for those things, why not everything?

In particular the Daily Mail's use of an eight-year-old article written by Clegg for the Guardian, in which he criticises attitudes to Germany which seem stuck in the 1950s – and fail to recognise how it has reinvented itself since – for its front-page splash outraged many Twitter commentators, who rapidly pointed to the Mail's history of seeking to deny refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis, and to Lord Rothermere's congratulatory telegram to Hitler for the Czech invasion in 1939.

The rapid responses on Twitter indicate just how much shorter the feedback loop now is for the mainstream media and electors – and how dangerous it can be to attack politicians who are riding a wave of popularity.

Whether it will have any effect on the readers either of Twitter or of the newspapers is harder to tell. Clearly, Twitter has never been the favoured stamping ground for Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express or Daily Telegraph readers. And it is unlikely that any of the papers' editors will be taking notice of what it says.

But it has at least provided some valuable comic content. Even Armando Iannucci, the writer of the political TV satire The Thick Of It, chipped in with a contribution that sounded straight out of the accompanying film In The Loop: "#nickcleggsfault Nick Clegg lived in same town as a seriously ill man and never visited him,though he knows he has a spare kidney."

Remember that line: it might turn up in the next series.