Bereaved families who lost loved ones to Covid have condemned Kemi Badenoch for hailing Boris Johnson as a “great prime minister” and claiming that the Partygate scandal was “overblown”.
The newly elected Tory leader said the story was exaggerated as she claimed the government should not have been fining people for “everyday activities” during lockdown.
Lobby Akinnola, a spokesman for the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice who lost his father during the pandemic, told The Independent Ms Badenoch’s comment was “cruel and highlights just how detached politicians can be from the people they represent”.
Mr Akinola said: “Badenoch’s resolute adherence to this perspective, that the betrayal of the nation’s trust is no big deal, just reinforces the need for the nation’s safety to be enshrined in policy, rather than dependent on who happens to be in the seat of power when crisis strikes.
“Her praise of Johnson flies in the face of the evidence heard in the COVID Inquiry and makes it all the more incumbent that the sitting government enact the recommendations from the Inquiry’s Module 1 report.”
Speaking the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Ms Badenoch had said: “I thought Boris Johnson was a great prime minister, but there were some serious issues that were not being resolved and I think that during that tenure the public thought that we were not speaking for them or looking out for them, we were in it for ourselves.
"Some of those things I think were perception issues, a lot of the stuff that happened around Partygate was not why I resigned.
"I thought that it was overblown. We should not have created fixed penalty notices, for example. That was us not going with our principles."
The comments sparked a furious backlash, with the Labour Party saying they “add insult to injury for families across Britain who followed the rules, missing loved one’s deaths and family funerals, whilst her colleagues partied in Downing Street”.
Labour chair Ellie Reeves said: “The leader may have changed but on her first day in the job Kemi Badenoch has proved that the Tories haven’t listened and they haven’t learnt.”
And the Liberal Democrats said it is “clear the Conservative Party haven’t learnt anything from the years of sleaze and scandal under their watch”.
Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesman Sarah Olney said: “Kemi Badenoch’s comments are an insult to those who lost family members during the pandemic while Boris Johnson partied and lied.
“On day one of the job she’s already shown she’s completely out of touch with the public.”
The row came a day after Ms Badenoch was picked by Tory members to succeed Rishi Sunak, calling for the party to “be honest” about its mistakes in government and unite behind her.
And it came as The Independent revealed that Ms Badenoch had made a joke about rape on her personal Facebook page in 2008.
The gaffes expose why many considered picking Ms Badenoch to lead the party a risk, with the former business secretary often generating uncomfortable headlines for the Conservatives.
She takes over the Conservatives as the party recorded its first poll lead over Labour since the Partygate scandal broke in December 2021, with BMG Research finding the Tories on 29 per cent of the vote, compared with Sir Keir’s party on 28 per cent.
But a YouGov poll published ahead of the result found four in 10 voters had an unfavourable view of Ms Badenoch, including 29 per cent of Conservative voters, while Britons were more likely to think Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer would make a better prime minister.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ms Badenoch committed to reversing Labour’s decision to impose VAT on private schools if she came to power, describing it as a "tax on aspiration" that would not raise money.
When it was suggested that this would involve taking money from state schools, she said: "At the moment, certainly up until Labour came in, we didn’t have this tax, so it’s not taking money away from state schools."
But Ms Badenoch was less willing to be drawn on whether she would reverse the increase in employers’ national insurance contributions if it meant taking money away from the NHS.
She said: "I don’t accept the premise of that question. We (the Conservatives) didn’t do those things in order to increase funding for the NHS, so it’s not a binary suggestion that if you don’t do this then that means less money for the NHS."
