Boris Johnson appears to have left his map at home while campaigning in the north east of England ahead of Thursday’s crunch local elections.
The prime minister left his partygate woes in London on May Day bank holiday Monday as he was pictured on his official Twitter feed with an ice-cream and surrounded by young people taking photos.
An accompanying tweet read: “It was a fantastic day to be out campaigning in Teesside, where we’re delivering a massive programme of investment as part of our plan to level up the whole of the UK.”
The trouble is, as plenty were keen to point out, he wasn’t in Teesside.
As The Whitley Whaler fish and chip shop in the background suggests, the PM was in Whitley Bay, the seaside town on Tyneside – or on the River Tyne, not the River Tees.
“Erm...how to say this...?,” tweeted Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner. “That’s NOT Teesside.”
While both areas would have been part of the sprawling Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, Whitley Bay today falls within the authority of North Tyneside Council, which goes to the polls on Thursday.
Middlesbrough, on the banks of the River Tees, is 40 miles away, and Teesside is split between County Durham and North Yorkshire for the purposes of local governance.
While there’s every chance Johnson himself did not pen the geographically-confused tweet, someone on Team Johnson appears to have spotted the error and deleted the indiscretion – replacing it with a tweet referencing the safer “north east”. But Twitter never forgets.