Tom Harwood: Emily Thornberry should apologise for her unthinking Tweet about Vladimir Lenin

Emily Thornberry's taste for Twitter has got her into trouble before, when Ed Miliband dismissed her over a seemingly sneering tweet about a white van and England flag during the Rochester and Strood by-election.

The tweet said "Image from Rochester", but the implication was clear to many.

Well yesterday Thornberry put her foot in it again, in an attempted defence of that very popular profession - the lawyer.

She wrote on Lawyers and Leaders: I think it's pretty cool to be in the company of the lawyers Obama, Mandela, Blair, Ghandi, Clinton, Roosevelt, Lenin and Lincoln.

She went on to add "if you insist Thatcher".

The Shadow Attorney General proudly boasting of Lenin before at a push adding Thatcher?

Lauding the man behind Soviet Russia's Red Terror, the murderer of the middle classes. Putting him in the same bracket as Ghandi, Obama, and Lincoln?! The mind boggles.

Lenin’s Red Terror slaughtered the Kulaks. And as for the urban middle classes and political free-thinkers in particular, the terror was just as brutal, with repression overseen by Lenin's secret service known as the Cheka.

It is estimated that Lenin oversaw the killing of up to 3 million of his own people. A tyrant. A monster. Someone who constructed totalitarian structures that then fell to an even worse and more murderous tyrant.

And this is someone that somehow a prominent member of the Shadow Cabinet sees it fit to laud?

Emily Thornberry should apologise for her unthinking tweet.

This isn't something to make light of.

To be clear she shouldn't lose her job, if anything Emily Thornberry is one of the strongest parliamentary performers the Labour Party has. I usually enjoy her sarcastic humour.

But this is a comment she should withdraw, less it reveal something at best clumsy and at worst sinister about the temperament at the top of her party.