Partygate scandal was overblown - Badenoch

The new Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, said the Partygate scandal was "overblown" as she rejected the need to "churn over" everything that had gone wrong with previous Tory prime ministers.

- Rowena Mason

Badenoch won the party leadership on Saturday and said she was going to be "honest" about what had gone wrong in the party.

However, speaking on BBC One's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, she said Boris Johnson was a "great prime minister" and that he had fallen into a "trap" of breaking Covid rules that should never have been introduced.

Badenoch said she had resigned during Johnson's premiership because of "serious issues" but not because of the "overblown" Partygate scandal.

Asked whether the public was wrong to be upset about Partygate, when Johnson and others in Downing Street did not stick to the Covid rules they had introduced, Badenoch said: "No, they were not wrong to be upset about Partygate. 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."