Photo analysis has suggested that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s congratulatory message to former Vice President Joe Biden over his supposed ‘win’, may have originally been a statement congratulating President Trump on securing re-election.
Following the pronouncement from mainstream media outlets in America and Europe that Mr Biden had ‘won’ the election — despite votes still being counted and President Trump vowing to pursue legal action over alleged voter fraud — the prime minister shared an image of a statement on social media hailing the result.
The message said: “Congratulations to Joe Biden on his election as President of the United States and to Kamala Harris on her historic achievement. The US is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together on our shared priorities, from climate change to trade and security.”
On Tuesday morning, however, the National File revealed that digital artefacts of the original message appeared to congratulate “Trump” on his “second term”. The words “on the future of this” are also still visible in the statement.
A graphic design expert told the news outlet that it appears as if the original message was “sloppily” covered up using the paint bucket tool in photoshop, rather than deleting the initial text layer.
“By this point, the creator would likely not have noticed the tiny fractals left from the first edit,” the expert explained.
The photoshop flub implies that Downing Street was expecting President Trump to win re-election easily, and therefore believed creating two files was unnecessary.
An enhanced version of the statement produced by the British political blog Guido Fawkes highlighted the original message. Breitbart London also used picture enhancement tools to verify that the original message sent by PM Boris Johnson did indeed contain the digital artefacts betraying a hasty edit.
The Associated Press reported that a government spokesman blamed a “technical error” and insisted that two messages had been prepared in advance, rather than one being erased and another written at the last moment. They said: “As you’d expect, two statements were prepared in advance for the outcome of this closely contested election… A technical error meant that parts of the alternative message were embedded in the background of the graphic.”
The speed at which Johnson rushed to congratulate Biden for his supposed ‘victory’ came as a surprise to many, considering the Democrat’s hostility towards the Brexit movement as opposed to Trump’s longstanding support for Britain to regain its sovereignty from the European Union.
While the media has often referred to Johnson as the “British Trump”, the two are on opposite sides of many issues, such as climate change and migration.
As Mayor of London, Johnson criticised then-candidate Trump, saying in 2015: “When Donald Trump says that there are parts of London that are no-go areas, I think he’s betraying a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of President of the United States.”
“I would invite him to come and see the whole of London and take him round the city except that I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump,” Johnson added.
While the relationship between the two leaders apparently improved following Johnson becoming prime minister, things took a turn for the worse over the PM’s reluctance to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei from the UK’s 5G networks, despite security concerns raised by President Trump and the U.S. national security apparatus.
In February, Johnson cancelled a visit to the White House following a heated argument over the issue, in which President Trump reportedly slammed down the phone on the British leader, “apoplectic” over Johnson’s desire to side with the Chinese Communist Party over the United States.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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