What was claimed
Angela Merkel, Theresa May and the Lithuanian President were pictured together at a party in their youth.
Our verdict
False.
Angela Merkel, Theresa May and the Lithuanian President were pictured together at a party in their youth.
False.
This image claims to show Angela Merkel, Theresa May and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė together in their youth. We are confident that it does not.
The image does indeed show Angela Merkel in her youth on the left, but the false caption says the woman in the middle is Mrs May, and the woman on the right is Mrs Grybauskaitė.
This claim seems to go viral every now and again, and was covered by the factchecking organisation Snopes back in March 2018.
So how do we know the image doesn’t show an extraordinary early meeting of three European leaders?
Primarily, because the woman in the middle looks nothing like Mrs May. The image of Mrs Merkel and her friends is reportedly from New Year’s Eve 1972. There is at least one image of Mrs May at school in 1971, as well as other photos of her in her teenage years: they bear little resemblance to the woman in this photograph. (They do very clearly look like a young Theresa May.)
We haven’t found a verified picture of Mrs Grybauskaitė from a similar time period. But the Lithuanian Embassy in London told us that the woman on the right is not Mrs Grybauskaitė.
Even without that confirmation, the evidence suggests it’s not Mrs Grybauskaitė. Consider how similar Mrs May looks nowadays to how she looked in 1971, and how similar Mrs Merkel looks today to how she looks in 1972. But Mrs Grybauskaitė as an adult does not look like the teenager in this photograph.
Given the evidence, we’re confident that Mrs Grybauskaitė and Mrs May did not travel from Lithuania and the UK to East Berlin in 1972 to ring in the new year with Angela Merkel.
You’ve probably seen a surge in misleading and unsubstantiated medical advice since the Covid-19 outbreak. If followed, it can put lives at serious risk. We need your help to protect us all from false and harmful information.
We’ve seen people claiming to be health professionals, family members, and even the government – offering dangerous tips like drinking warm water or gargling to prevent infection. Neither of these will work.
The longer claims like these go unchecked, the more they are repeated and believed. It can put people’s health at serious risk, when our services are already under pressure.
Today, you have the opportunity to help save lives. Good information about Covid-19 could be the difference between someone taking the right precautions to protect themselves and their families, or not. Could you help protect us all from false and harmful information today?
Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.