David Cameron Joins Twitter, and Pith Follows

Give him points for effort. But Mr. Cameron, who had already attracted more than 80,000 followers by Sunday afternoon, clearly had not reckoned with the sharp, anarchic sense of humor that Twitter can unleash, particularly among the annoyed and the restive.

Angry at the government’s economic philosophy, at an austerity budget filled with measures cutting jobs and services, at the reorganization of the National Health Service, at recent suggestions by Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, that he would like to limit abortion rights, the Twitter-using public unleashed a torrent of witty, mean remarks.

Some teased Mr. Cameron’s privileged background and rich friends. Others attacked his policies. Others were just funny.

Jonathan Marriott wrote, “Times are hard. Do I sack the cleaner, the gardener or just use tax avoidance techniques?”

Johnmc72 asked: “Do you know anyone who has ever eaten soup from a cereal bowl?”

The whole exercise apparently started when Lord Prescott, a Labour politician and former deputy prime minister who is now out of office and spends a lot of time on Twitter, noticed that Mr. Cameron had joined the Twitterati. He responded with a fakely innocent suggestion.

“Now that @david_cameron is on Twitter, why don’t we ask him a few questions?” he posted.

And the #askdave thread was born — possibly an allusion to #askboris, the hashtag the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, uses when he opens the floor on Twitter and takes questions from constituents. Those chats are generally fairly jolly, like Mr. Johnson himself.

By contrast, #askdave did not turn out to be the most flattering of threads.

Many of the questions to Mr. Cameron involved matters of upper-crust etiquette, including things like how to find an “average Joe” kind of Champagne when one is tired of Dom Pérignon; how many cooks to hire in one’s kitchen; and what to do with a trust valued at £30 million, or about $48 million — the amount that Mr. Cameron and his wife stand to inherit, according to one account, from their families.

There were more:

¶ “Our neighbour works in trade, would it be inappropriate to invite them to our next country supper?” Bryan Nott asked.

¶ “How do I know which way up my cummerbund goes?” Stephen Thomas asked.

¶ “I wonder if you could tell me which wine goes best with roast swan?” Amanda asked.

Other posts showed a bitterness toward Mr. Cameron’s policies:

¶ “When you said the Tories would promote growth in UK, you did mean in unemployment, homelessness and the deficit, right?” Tiernan Douieb wrote.

¶ “Please tell us @david_cameron, what exactly is it about women that makes you want to erode their human rights?” Dusty asked.

¶ “Do you wear special contacts that render the poor invisible?” Ben Bartlett said.

Many on Twitter accused Mr. Cameron of breaking various promises. But he has stuck at least to his Twitter promise of not sending “too many tweets.” As of Sunday evening, he had written four, one explaining that he was about to go on television to talk about how his government is “on the side of people who want to get on in life.”