Good times were had by all at the Wansbeck Constituency Labour Party dinner on Friday. The all-star lineup included local MP Ian Lavery, his parliamentary colleagues Graeme Morris and Kate Osborne, Mick Lynch, and Labour’s North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll. All raising their glasses to champagne socialism.

It must have been awkward for Jamie Driscoll, though. He happened to share a table with ex-Labour members expelled for links to proscribed communist group Socialist Action, including Holly Waddell and his former campaign chief Tony Pierre. Presumably Driscoll made amends with Pierre after airbrushing him from history on social media…

Breaking bread with suspended socialists? People have been kicked off Labour’s candidates’ list for less in the last few weeks…

Labour’s Mayor of North of Tyne – and self-confessed socialist – Jamie Driscoll hit the campaign trail yesterday to knock on doors and smile with babies ahead of the Camperdown ward by-election. Everything went smoothly, and the Mayor even posted some nice pictures of the day on social media. Except for one strange detail: a mysterious pixellation in the middle of the photograph…

The apparition looming behind Driscoll’s entourage, it turns out, is actually the airbrushed remains of Driscolls’s former campaign manager Tony Pierre – a man recently booted from the Labour Party over his connections to the Trotskyist loonies at Socialist Appeal. A quick scan of other, untouched photos from the same day reveals Pierre standing proudly next to his comrades, Labour campaign literature in hand, despite his expulsion only four months ago… 

Driscoll, recognising the potential embarrassment of having a banned communist ruin his pretty picture, obviously decided the best course was to open Photoshop and scrub his friend from the books. To be fair, it’s not the first time a socialist has airbrushed a trot from history…

Even so, not the worst Photoshop disaster Labour have ever inflicted upon us…