Kemi Badenoch hits back at Robert Jenrick’s ‘disrespectful’ jibe

During the coronavirus pandemic, Badenoch was a Treasury minister. She said she would not apologise for spending “a lot” during Covid but added: “I think we just overran it to the point where it made inflation worse than it needed to be.”

She also said she thought the government “overdid it in terms of the length of lockdown”.

“There was a King Canute sort of situation. I thought that we were trying to do too much, that this was where government was overstretching itself and we weren’t trusting people enough.

“The biggest thing I hated was the fixed penalty notices.”

The notices were issued by the police to people who breached Covid rules, resulting in fines of between £200 and £10,000.

Both Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the prime minister and chancellor during the pandemic, were issued with fines for breaching the regulations.

Badenoch said: “If Boris did not bring in those fixed penalty notices, he would not have had the Partygate scandal, certainly not to the extent that it was… he got caught in a trap that he had set for himself.”

She said Conservatives had “strayed away” from their principles of freedom.