New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch says Partygate was 'overblown', faces backlash from Covid bereaved

UK’s Conservative Party’s new leader Kemi Badenoch is already facing backlash after families bereaved by the Covid pandemic say they feel insulted by her claim that the Partygate scandal was “overblown”. During a conversation with BBC, Badenoch went on to state that former UK PM Boris Johnson had fallen into a “trap” of breaking lockdown rules that should never have been introduced.

“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 new Tory leader said on Sunday. “The public was not wrong to be upset about Partygate. The problem was that we should not have criminalised everyday activities the way that we did,” she added.

Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England whose older brother Umar died of Covid while self-isolating noted that Badenoch should not gloss over the horror of the pandemic.

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““Ms Badenoch needs to remember that people were dying and being stored in industrial fridges while those in government party in breach of the rules that they created for the rest of us. It was a question of trust and integrity and such a failure cannot ever be overblown,” he said.

The backlash that followed

Naomi Fulop, whose mother, Christina, died in January 2021, six days before it would be found that the No 10 broke the rules said that Badenoch’s comments were “insulting and extremely painful”.  “It is not possible to overblow the impact of those in government partying while my mother died alone. We then had to have a very restricted funeral, as did thousands and thousands of other people," she said.

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Meanwhile, Fulop, who is a member of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK group (CBFJUK) insisted that the new Tory leader is “trying to appeal to people who don’t agree with lockdowns. She’s deeply misguided because nobody is pro-lockdown. Lockdowns are something that you have to have when everything else has failed," The Guardian reported.

Dr Simon Williams, a behavioural scientist and public health researcher at Swansea University, said Badenoch’s remarks were “disgraceful”. " “Research has shown that Partygate and other scandals really did have an effect on public trust in government and particularly public trust in the rules. So as well as being offensive, it’s very unhelpful to try to retrospectively minimise the impact of Partygate," he remarked.

The newly elected Conservative leader is yet to respond to the backlash.