Boris Johnson was photoshopped out of a photo tweeted by business secretary Grant Shapps featuring a failed space rocket.
The senior Tory tweeted the image on Sunday, which appeared to show him laughing during a visit to the Virgin Orbit spacecraft in Cornwall earlier this year. And while the image tweeted shows Mr Shapps on his own during the visit, he was in fact accompanied by the former Prime Minister.
Originally, Boris Johnson was front and centre in the photograph. The tweet was deleted from Mr Shapps' account this morning after many readers had already spotted the doctored image, the Mirror reports.
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An almost identical image was posted on the Number 10 Flickr account on the date of June 9, 2021. It shows the then-Conservative leader, brow furrowed and arm raised, wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words: "Prime Minister."
The current Prime Minister's spokesperson denied airbrushing the former Prime Minister constituted "Stalinist revisionism". The rocket featured in the image was a part of a launch attempt on Tuesday morning which failed due to an "anomaly" during the flight.
It took off from Cornwall, before the Virgin Orbit plane flew to 35,000ft over the Atlantic Ocean and jettisoned the rocket containing nine small satellites towards space. Organisers of the Start Me Up missions said the rocket failed to orbit.
After the launch failed, Mr Shapps told Sky News: "Space is difficult. Everyone's used to seeing rockets which explode from Japan, what have you. The great thing about this technology is that no-one was harmed. The pilots came back in the aircraft.
"It didn't work. I've no doubt that they'll pick themselves up, dust themselves off and they'll go again once they find out what exactly went wrong with it."
Mr Shapps did not know the time schedule for another possible attempt.
"It was a big moment nonetheless yesterday," he added.
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