New Tory chief Kemi Badenoch says Partygate scandal was ‘overblown’

New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has claimed Boris Johnson was a “great” Prime Minister and the Partygate scandal was “overblown”.

In her first major interview since winning the contest to replace Rishi Sunak, Ms Badenoch suggested the problem instead was with the Covid fines. During his time in No10, Mr Johnson became the first sitting PM to be sanctioned by police after he was found to have breached his own Covid rules.

Despite being among dozens who resigned from his government in July 2022, Ms Badenoch told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “I thought he was a great Prime Minister.

“But there were some serious issues which 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.”

She went on: “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.”

She added that the public was “not wrong to be upset about partygate”, but said : “The problem was that we should not have criminalised everyday activities the way that we did.

“People going out for walks, all of them having fixed penalty notices, that was what ended up creating a trap for Boris Johnson.” The Labour MP for Rochdale Paul Waugh responded on X: “The Tories really haven’t learned anything have they?”

But Ms Badenoch insisted she wanted to “draw a line” under the Tories’ problems. She said: “We’ve lost an election – an historic defeat. Simply churning over every single incident is not going to be helpful with where we are today.”

Pressed on the “recklessness” of the 49-day PM Liz Truss, she replied: “What I’m here to do is talk about how I’m going to be leading the Conservative Party. We can have a post-mortem on each and every Prime Minister over the last 14 years, but I don’t think that’s particularly helpful.”

During her first key interview, M Badenoch also said she would reverse Labour’s decision to impose VAT on private school fees. Asked whether she would reverse Labour’s private schools policy, she said: “Yes, yes I would.

“And the reason why is it is a tax on aspiration, but it won’t raise any money.”

When it was suggested 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.

“This is not what’s happening, and we also see there is a knock-on effect with state schools having to take more pupils.

“But the bottom line is that that is a tax on aspiration. Taxing education is wrong, it is against our principles, so yes that is the sort of thing that I can very easily say we would not do that.”