Teenage kicks for the Labour leader as #milifandom takes hold

In one of the more surprising developments of the election, Ed Miliband has won the support of an army of teenage girls describing themselves as the Milifandom.

Twitter was awash with messages marked with the hashtag milifandom, declaring passion for the Labour leader in tones normally reserved for film stars or pop singers.

Mr Miliband’s face has been photoshopped on to images of Superman and James Bond, while a clip of him gazing into the camera to the tune of George Michael singing Careless Whisper racked up almost three million “loops” on video-sharing site Vine.

The trend appears to have been started by a Twitter user with the handle @twcuddleston, who identified herself as a 17-year-old student and Labour Party member called Abby and “leader of the £milifandom, a movement against the distorted media portrayal of Ed”.

Writing on Twitter, Abby said: “David Cameron doesn’t think I deserve the vote because I’m 17. I started the £milifandom campaign to show how powerful young people are.”

With messages announcing “I love ed miliband so much it is painful” and “if I ever met ed miliband I could die happy tbh, he’s cool”, it was difficult to judge the level of irony involved in the phenomenon, which was the top trending hashtag in the UK for parts of yesterday.

The vintage of some of the stars on to whose bodies Mr Miliband’s head was being pasted – Freddie Mercury, Harrison Ford, David Bowie and Prince – suggested that some of those posting messages were more likely to be middle-aged than teenage.

But it marks a shift in popular depictions of the Labour leader, who has previously suffered from being presented as an awkward geek, thanks to photos of him struggling to eat a bacon sandwich and cartoons showing him as animated inventor Wallace.

Sources close to Mr Miliband have declined to reveal his reaction to his new fan base, but the party posted a response on its official Facebook page: “We didn’t see this coming…If you’re fired up about Ed, changing Britain, and making your voice heard, we’d love you to be on the team.”