A Tory minister has confessed to throwing away a life size cutout of David Miliband saying: “Bananas”.
Back in his heyday as a Gordon Brown’s foreign secretary, the elder Miliband was photographed holding a banana at the 2008 Labour Party conference.
He later quit the Labour frontbench - and eventually parliament and the country - after narrowly losing out on his party’s leadership to his younger brother.
As he fades from memory in British public life, someone spotted a life-size cutout of Miliband saying “Bananas!” in a bin at the back of the Department of Health.
It recalls the moment Miliband was photographed smiling awkwardly while holding a banana at the 2008 Labour Party conference.
The picture of the binned cutout was sent to political blog Guido Fawkes, which told the culprit to step forward.
Greg Hands, Minister of State for International Trade, tweeted to confess.
He revealed he acquired it in September, 2010, when he was expecting David Miliband to be confirmed as Labour leader.
Hands appears to have held out some hope Miliband would return to frontline British politics longer than most.
The persistent notion Miliband would do so was finally quashed for good after the 2015 election, when he ruled out returning to Britain.
But Hands apparently only just gave up the ghost.
Though Hands has only had it since 2010, HuffPost UK found the cutout - or an another just like it - is nearly as old as the banana photograph itself.
Itappeared at the 2008 Conservative Party Conference which took place the week after Labour’s.