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Downing Street’s congratulatory message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for winning the US presidential election contains a hidden message congratulating Donald Trump on winning a second term in office.
The message, posted on Twitter as a picture a few hours after US television networks called for Biden’s election, congratulates the president-elect on his election and Harris “on his historic achievement.”
But the image, a simple white-on-black block of text, is more than meets the eye. A simple color adjustment reveals a second hidden message in the background.
Above and behind the words “Joe Biden in his election”, the shadow of the words “Trump in” becomes faintly visible. Where the main message says “America is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together,” the words “second term” appear. And under the words “shared priorities” is the phrase “about the future of this.”
The message, first reported by the Guido Fawkes blog, suggests that No. 10 was bracing for the possibility of congratulating Donald Trump on re-election long after it became clear that Joe Biden was winning the count in key states in the battlefield.
But the baffling decision to alter a pre-existing image rather than create a completely new one, let alone not completely remove the original message, seems likely to create further friction between the UK government and the incoming administration.
A UK government spokesperson said: “Unsurprisingly, two statements were prepared in advance for the outcome of this highly contested election. A technical error meant that parts of the alternate message were embedded in the background of the graphic. “
The reveal comes amid a relationship already disturbed by Biden’s memorable depiction of Johnson as the “physical and emotional clone of Donald Trump.”
Even before the hidden message was revealed, Tommy Vietor, a former Obama speechwriter and podcast host seen as a campaign surrogate for Biden, reacted to the number 10’s congratulatory message with disdain. “This disgusting shapeshift is heavy,” Vietor tweeted. “We will never forget his racist comments about Obama and his slavish devotion to Trump, but with a clean Instagram graphic.”
The hidden message suggests that the number 10 was uncertain to the end about who the winning candidate was, even as Biden’s leadership in key states grew and the Trump campaign began its increasingly frantic legal efforts to thwart the conclusion of the count.
Even after elections were called on Saturday afternoon, UK government ministers continued to hide their message. On Sunday morning, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, refused to agree with the statement “every vote must be counted in a democratic election.”
“What you’re really trying to do is drag me into the legal claims about whether all the votes have been counted correctly,” Raab told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge. Ridge noted that not only had Raab sidestepped the question: the prime minister’s own spokesman had given an equally evasive answer last week.
