The tweet
Ed Balls
Original tweet on X · Ed Balls on X
Why it mattered
Ed Balls was trying to search Twitter for his own name on 28 April 2011. He put it in a tweet instead. The two-word post stayed online, and Twitter users began marking 28 April as Ed Balls Day.
Balls eventually joined the joke himself. In 2021 he marked the tenth anniversary with a photo of himself holding a cake, and Yvette Cooper replied to ask how ten years could have passed already. The later tweets tell the other half of the story: the politician who made the mistake became one of the people keeping the joke alive.