Overzealous cleaners have scrubbed Banksy’s coronavirus-inspired artwork from the London Underground, even before the street artist could claim it as his own.

Banksy disguised himself as a cleaner earlier this week to graffiti pictures of masked rats and hand sanitiser – titled If You Don’t Mask, You Don’t Get – on a Circle Line carriage.

Dressed in a high-vis jacket, boiler suit, goggles and face mask, Banksy fooled passengers into thinking he was there as a cleaner.

But he was really spraying images – including a black rat coughing and sneezing green paint across the train carriage’s window and walls – that were designed to enforce public health messages about wearing masks during the pandemic.

However, by the time Banksy had finished and unveiled his latest work in a video on his Instagram account, it had already been scrubbed away by Tube cleaning crews.

“It was treated like any other graffiti on the network,” a source told the BBC.

“The job of the cleaners is to make sure the network is clean, especially given the current climate.”

Tweet from @TfL

It’s far from the first time Banksy’s work has been destroyed. In Melbourne in 2016, three of his stencils in a city lane were destroyed to make way for a new door.

“The rubble was mindlessly loaded into a skip,” Melbourne Walks wrote on Facebook at the time.

“Two more Banksy stencils two metres away were previously destroyed in 2014. Five Banksy in three years.

By contrast, another Banksy work – an oil painting showing Britain’s House of Commons overrun with chimpanzees fetched a record near £10 million ($18 million) at auction – in October 2019.

Painted in 2009, the four-metre Devolved Parliament is Banksy’s largest work and one of his best known non-street artworks.

The artist reacted on Instagram at the time, saying it was a record for one of his works and “shame I didn’t still own it”.