28 January 2022 Fact checks

Fake Sky News tweet claims PM drank with foxhound pack

By Grace Rahman • 1 min

What was claimed

Sky News tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: New photos show Boris Johnson drinking with the Berkeley Hunt at get together during first lockdown. More to follow….#PartyGate”.

Our verdict

This tweet wasn’t tweeted by an official Sky News account. No such story has been reported.

A tweet which had around 300 retweets before the account was suspended, and appearing to be from a Sky News account, says: “BREAKING NEWS: New photos show Boris Johnson drinking with the Berkeley Hunt at get together during first lockdown. More to follow….#PartyGate”.

However, the Twitter account was not an official Sky News one. Although it features Sky News’ branding, it is not verified, had less than 50 followers and the account handle was “@skybreaking420”. The real breaking news account for Sky has 4.8 million followers and uses the handle @SkyNewsBreak.

No such story, about Boris Johnson drinking with the Gloucestershire-based hound pack, has been published by Sky News or any other news outlet at the time of writing.

Screenshots of the tweet have also been shared on Facebook.

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We have written about the alleged parties at Downing Street here.

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Social media

This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the tweet is fake and no such story has been reported.