Boris Johnson’s elbow is all that remains after Grant Shapps ‘edits picture’

Boris Johnson was entirely cropped out of a photo tweeted by his old colleague Grant Shapps.

Well, he nearly was.

It didn’t take long for eagle-eyed observers to spot the vanishing act in the Business Secretary’s now-deleted post.

The Cabinet minister was celebrating the first-ever launch of a satellite from European soil – which didn’t end too well – and borrowed an image from his 2021 trip to Spaceport in Cornwall.

But where Mr Johnson once stood, a curious white blur had been substituted in.

Perhaps it was an attempt to erase the memory of last year’s political turmoil, but it was so badly done you could still see Mr Johnson’s elbow.

Mr Shapps told the BBC he wasn’t aware it had been edited.

‘Grant Shapps photoshops out Boris Johnson, yet decides to leave in his elbow,’ Jon Morter tweeted with a crying laughter emoji.

Marc Schreckenstein compared the post with infamous photoshopper Joseph Stalin, saying: ‘It seems Grant Shapps is learning lessons from history.

‘Amongst Grant Shapps’ various pseudonyms, one just happens to be “Joseph Stalin”.’

After taking off from Cornwall, the Virgin Orbit plane flew over the Atlantic Ocean where it jettisoned the rocket containing nine small satellites towards space.

But the launch attempt ended in failure when the rocket suffered an ‘anomaly’ during the flight.

Organisers of the Start Me Up mission confirmed it failed to orbit.

Mr Shapps later 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.’

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