City MP Kerry McCarthy was bombarded with bizarre messages on Twitter after comedian Ross Noble ordered his 30,000 followers to ask her silly questions.

The government's "Twitter Tsar" was at a breakfast meeting about the use of social networking sites in politics when posts, known as Tweets, began rolling in on a range of unusual topics.

Questions posed included "What's love got to do, got to do with it?" and "Is there any use for blind guide dogs?"

The Bristol East MP was initially unaware of what was happening and posted "Am I taking part in an ask-Kerry-silly-questions contest, and no one's told me?"

But, as it became clear she was the subject of a campaign co-ordinated by the award-winning stand-up she spent half an hour answering some of the hundreds of messages.

To one tweeter who asked "Can you confirm that King Kong will get a posthumous state apology?", she said: "I think that's a matter for the US government, but I think he should."

Asked by another "Chicken or the egg?" She said: "Neither, I'm vegan".

Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to "follow each other" and post messages of a maximum of 140 characters. Ms McCarthy took the cyber attack in good humour insisting it was just a bit of fun that had actually swelled the number of people who follow her Tweets by 600, taking her up to 4,253.

She used the attention it focused upon her to encourage users of the site to follow the live posts from Prime Minister's Questions, the weekly session in the Commons on Wednesdays.

"It was very funny," she told the Evening Post. "I hadn't realised what was happening at first. Then I started to try to answer a few but it is so fast moving there was no way I could keep up.

"There is a serious side to it though, I got 600 new followers in just one morning as a result of it and have suggested they follow PMQs on it among other things. Although they're being silly at the moment I'm sure they're politically aware people."

Ross Noble, known for his off-the-wall humour, apparently uses his Twitter account to ask fans to bombard a fellow user with questions once a week, His next target will be Boris Johnson.

His agent did not return calls.