This supposed Chuka Umunna tweet doesn’t seem to be real

The tweet in question seems to be fake, it isn’t formatted in the same way as Twitter was five years ago and we’ve found no evidence Mr Umunna ever tweeted this.

This morning Conservative MP Steve Double shared an image supposedly of a tweet from Chuka Umunna, the former Labour and Change UK MP who yesterday announced he would be joining the Liberal Democrats. Conservative MP James Cleverly also appears to have retweeted then deleted the image.

The image claims to show Umunna tweeting in June 2014 that he “wouldn’t be caught dead in a yellow rosette, and that’s a #chukapromise”.

It doesn’t seem like that tweet is the genuine article though. There is no existing tweet from Mr Umunna’s account using the hashtag “chukapromise”, and no tweets (from any MP) using that hashtag have ever been deleted.

In the image of the supposed tweet the date is 2014, but the layout of Twitter was quite different back then, and the font isn’t the same either.

That’s not to say that Chuka Umunna has never criticised the Liberal Democrats before, as can be seen from his Twitter history.