Forget Prime Minister's Question Time – How about PM's Twitter Time?

Every Wednesday David Cameron lines up at the dispatch box to host Prime Minister’s Question Time. It is the time when he goes head to head with the leader of the opposition – for six questions – and then tackles cheeky questions from Labour back benchers alongside compliments from fawning members of his own party.

And what does the UK public learn from this exercise? Not a great deal apart form the fact that 1 Politicians can be very rude and 2 The leaders of both parties love a bit of political point scoring.

Surely it would be better if Dave C and his crew sat down each week for a few hours and fielded questions from the great British Public via Twitter.

Well it may just happen for it is now clear that the ConDems are ready to embrace Twitter. On Thursday June 9th the Foreign Secretary @WilliamJHague is to answer questions on the situation in Libya and the Arab Spring via Twitter. This basically gives him a chance to gauge the views of the UK public while at the same time imparting a few gems gleaned from his recent trips to Benghazi in Libya.

Questions can be submitted to the Foreign Secretary using the hashtag #askFS and the fun starts at 1600 on Thursday 9 June (UK time). You will be able to follow the Q&A here.

In some respects it is pretty brave of William Hague to do this especially given the notorious liberal (small l) bias of UK micro bloggers. I do hope though that it sets a percent in which people can directly quiz their elected representatives even if those in power are limited to 140 character responses.