Boris Johnson sets his watch 12 minutes fast, photos show

• A photo of the UK PM observing a minute's silence at 11 a.m. showed his watch set to 11:14 a.m.
• Analyses of other photos of Johnson show his watch is consistently running fast.
• He had a habit of arriving at the last minute to events, one report said.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson consistently has his watch set at least 12 minutes fast, according to analyses of his photographs.

Questions over his timekeeping arose after he was photographed on Monday observing a minute's silence for the victims of the Plymouth shootings at 11 a.m.

The clock on the mantelpiece behind Johnson showed a little after 11 a.m., but his watch said 11:14 a.m.:

Analysis of the photo's EXIF data, which contains details about when and how the photograph was taken, reveals it was taken at 11:01 a.m. This analysis has been verified by Insider.

Another photo of Johnson from early July showed him on his way to watch England's national football team play Denmark in the Euro 2020 competition.

The time on his watch read 6:58 p.m., but the EXIF data has the time of the photograph as being at 6:46 p.m.

Questions over Johnson's watch were previously raised on social media that a January 2021 broadcast by the prime minister was not live, with viewers pointing to his watch as evidence for their claims that it had been pre-recorded earlier that day.

FullFact, a British independent fact-checking service, verified that the broadcast was live and that social media users were merely looking at the watch upside down.

Jeremy Vine, a British broadcaster and journalist, also wrote about the prime minister's timekeeping for The Spectator in June 2019.

Vine told two separate incidents in which Johnson arrived very shortly before he was due to deliver a speech at an event, with concerns from the guests that he was running late.

"Suddenly - BOOM. A rush of wind from an opened door, a golden mop, a heave of body and dinner jacket onto the chair next to mine, and the breathless question, at 9.28pm: 'JEREMY. Where exactly AM I?'" he wrote.

"I actually had that stress feeling - a kind of sunburn, creeping across my arms and back. So he was late and he had not prepared a speech. And he was due onstage in ninety seconds."