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Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch has hit out at Boris Johnson‘s Partygate fines.
The former prime minister was found to have lied to parliament over late night bashes in Downing Street while the rest of the country was under Covid restrictions.
And he was fined when he received a fixed penalty notice for a birthday party in No 10 when such events were banned.
Asked about Covid-era restrictions, Ms Badenoch hit out at the fines.
She told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “The biggest thing I hated was the fixed penalty notices. That we were creating new criminal behaviour on what was everyday activity granted in exceptional circumstances. If we didn’t, you know, 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, because he then got caught in a trap that he had set for himself”.
Last week Ms Badenoch was accused of endorsing “disgraceful” and “wrong” claims about mental health.
The outcry came after she launched a pamphlet that said the number of claims for mental health problems in Britain has “outpaced any conceivable clinical explanation”.
The Mental Health Foundation attacked the statement as “wrong”, while NHS mental health director Claire Murdoch described the whole section on mental health as “disgraceful”.
The former business secretary was also accused of “stigmatising” autism by backing different claims – contained in the same pamphlet – which suggested people with the condition get “economic advantages and protections”.
