A politician has finally started tweeting, but insists she does not have the time to respond to questions on the site.

Witham MP Priti Patel has begun posting messages from her @priti4witham account on Twitter.

She had previously resisted calls to become actively involved in social networks.

As of last Monday, she had posted 18 messages from the account, mostly detailing places in her constituency she had visited.

Ms Patel said: “I’ll be quite frank - in this day and age it is a way of people working out what you are doing locally.

“It is time-consuming so I don’t do it that often and I have no intention of responding or having dialogue.

“I have a big constituency and sometimes it is good for them to know what I am doing - not everybody realises how big the Witham constituency is.”