Ed Miliband in 'Blackbusters' blunder

Labour's Twitter woes continued today as Ed Miliband led tributes to television host Bob Holness - but mistakenly called him the presenter of "Blackbusters".

The Labour leader's keyboard blunder came a day after he gave his shadow minister Diane Abbott "a severe dressing down" following the race row she sparked on the micro blogging site.

Mr Miliband's error unfolded as he took to the internet to comment on today's death of 83-year-old Holness, who hosted the popular ITV game show Blockbusters.

His official Twitter feed told his 114,500 followers: "Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters."

The post was quickly deleted and replaced with the correct version - but not before it had been retweeted across the web and the hashtag £blackbusters soon soared to become the third most popular Twitter topic.

Wags' comments on the site included: "Ed Miliband would like an 'O' please Bob" - a reference to the selection of letters from the alphabet featured in Blockbusters.

Today's unfortunate slip followed the Labour leader's anger at party frontbencher Ms Abbott yesterday after she claimed on Twitter that "white people love playing 'divide & rule"'.

She later apologised and a Labour spokesman said: "We disagree with Diane's tweet.

"It is wrong to make sweeping generalisations about any race, creed, or culture.

"The Labour Party has always campaigned against such behaviour - and so has Diane Abbott."

Prime Minister David Cameron famously said in 2009 that he did not use Twitter because too many tweets "might make a twat".

PA