Downing Street’s congratulatory message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on winning the US presidential election contains a hidden message congratulating Donald Trump for winning a second term in office. The message, posted on Twitter as an image a few hours after the US TV networks called the election for Biden, congratulates the president-elect on his election, and Harris “on her historic achievement”. But the image, a simple white-on-black block of text, is more than it seems. A simple colour adjustment reveals a second message hidden in the background. Above and behind the words “Joe Biden on his election”, the shadow of the words “Trump on” become faintly visible. Where the main message reads “the US is our most important ally and I look forward to working closely together”, the words “second term” appear. And below the words “shared priorities” is the phrase “on the future of this”. The message, first reported by the Guido Fawkes blog, suggests that No 10 was preparing for the possibility of congratulating Donald Trump on a re-election long after it had become clear that Joe Biden was winning the count in key battleground states. But the baffling decision to alter a pre-existing image rather than create an entirely new one, let alone to not then fully delete the original message, looks likely to create more friction between the UK government and the incoming administration. A UK government spokesperson 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 revelation comes amid a relationship already troubled by Biden’s memorable description 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 podcaster viewed as a campaign surrogate for Biden, reacted to No 10’s message of congratulation with disdain. “This shapeshifting creep weighs in,” Vietor tweeted. “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump but neat Instagram graphic.” The hidden message suggests No 10 was uncertain until the very end about who the winning candidate was, even as Biden’s lead in key states grew and the Trump campaign began its increasingly frantic legal efforts to frustrate the conclusion of the count. Even after the election was called on Saturday afternoon, UK government ministers continued to hedge their message. On Sunday morning, Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, declined to agree with the statement “every vote should be counted in a democratic election”. “What you’re really trying to do is to drag me into the legal claims about whether or not all the votes have properly been counted,” Raab told Sky News’s Sophy Ridge. Ridge noted that it was not only Raab who had sidestepped the question: the prime minster’s own spokesperson had given a similarly evasive answer last week.