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15 March 2026

Which news accounts are MPs reading?

Hello! This website is mostly dedicated to presenting the findings from a dataset of the 450,000 people followed by Britain’s 611 MPs who are active on Twitter. If you’ve got this far, you’ve probably spent some time clicking around the data yourself. In this blog I’ll be sharing the bits I find most interesting and going a bit further by exploring connections with other datasets.

There are two kinds of X account that MPs are more likely to follow than any others: other politicians and journalists. This article looks at which journalists are getting the most attention from MPs.

Of the top 100 accounts followed by MPs, 33 are journalists (and 38 are politicians). While many MPs are unlikely to pay much attention to their Twitter feeds, it is undeniable that plenty do, and looking at these accounts can help to understand the sorts of people with the furthest reach into Westminster.

The top 10 journalists, broadcasters or columnists by the number of MPs following them are:

To come at the top of this list, journalists need to attract a range of followers from across the political spectrum. Columnists on the left or right, for example, often score particularly well with MPs from a specific party, but underperform on this measure of total MP followers.

We can also look at which journalists punch above their weight within particular parties by comparing their ranking among that party’s MPs to their overall ranking across all MPs. In the case of the Labour Party, the following accounts stand out as being followed by Labour MPs far more than their overall position would suggest:

Conversely, these accounts overperform most with Conservative MPs:

The number of MP followers is an interesting way to measure ‘popularity’ because it encapsulates total accumulated interest in an account over time, so people often ‘collect’ their MP followers from previous careers. Thus it is no suprise that top of this list are a few former Conservative ministers. This is also why Labour backbenchers with previous careers in journalism perform well on the overall leaderboard.

Of course, party membership is a fairly crude way of measuring political alignment. Both the Conservative and Labour parties contain a wide range of views, and in an era of multiparty politics there are plenty of MPs outside the two largest parties as well.

To add more detail, we can use the excellent ranking of MPs by their left-right position from Survation, UK in a Changing Europe and Royal Holloway, University of London, and calculate an average score for the positions of the MPs following any given account. This gives us a unique proxy for how left or right leaning the audience of each of these journalists are.

To illustrate this, some notable commentators with sizeable followings on the left of politics are Owen Jones and Marina Purkiss. Conversely, Tom Harwood and Julia Hartley-Brewer attract much more right-leaning followers.

Below, I’ve plotted the top 200 journalists in the dataset by the average ideological position of the MPs who follow them. Accounts with the largest number of MP followers (often broadcasters) tend to attract MPs from across the political spectrum.

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(Note I used a language model to classify accounts based on whether they are journalists, commentators or broadcasters, so you might spot some some of these accounts might not exactly fit a standard definition of journalist.)

All of this is just one way of looking at the dataset presented on this site, and only looks at journalists included in the dataset. The network of who MPs follow contains many other patterns - some obvious, others more surprising. Over the next few days I’ll dig further into the data and highlight some of the other trends that stand out.