Guardian's Grace Dent turns tables on 'idiotic' online troll

LATEST lesson from Twitter School: if you are going to cross swords with anyone on the micro-blogging site, try to avoid sharp-witted journalists such as The Guardian's TV critic Grace Dent. Especially if you actually work for them, however indirectly.

Which brings us to Mufadal Juwaji, who is employed by – at least, he was until this morning - the PR company Hill+Knowlton Strategies.

Juwaji describes himself as a "passionate PR profesional” [sic] and "digital communications evangelist". Not evangelical enough, however, to realise that his company works with Dent.

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So when he decided to share his thoughts with Twitter about Grace Dent during last night's repeat of Friday's Have I Got News For You, on which the Guardian writer appeared as a panelist alongside Ian Hislop, he let rip.

"@gracedent reminds me of a girlfriend I once had," he opined. "By girlfriend I mean that time I accidentally made love to an ugly abhorrent horse #hignfy"

Perhaps not being as au fait with the medium of Twitter as he claimed - by sending a tweet with Dent's Twitter handle at the front of it he ensured it would arrive in her Connect inbox - Jawal certainly wasn't expecting to receive the following response from the writer minutes later:

"@Mufadal Hi there Mufadel. How much do you like your job at Hill and Knowlton?"

Shortly followed by:

"@Mufadal I'm wondering, as a public relations person for a firm I work with, what your thinking was in sending me this message?"

A mortified Jawal swiftly tweeted his apologies, saying: "Unreservedly withdraw my vulgar and puerile comment regarding @gracedent, especially in light of the bbc doc on internet trolls last week."

He also replied to Dent, claiming his original tweet was "naive and ill-warranted" and said that he would not delete it so that he would have to "bare the full brunt of my idiocy".

Dent gave this short shrift, informing Jawal that "you'll bear the brunt of your idiocy at 10am tomorrow morning when you're unemployed. Good luck."

Jawal's current employment prospects are unknown, but seeing that H+K Strategies UK were tweeting yesterday asking if "Any wonderful people want to join our agency?" one has to fear for Jawal's chances.