It is very encouraging to see a black woman leading a British political party for the first time. However, the Guardian reports on Kemi Badenoch’s initial interview as leader, on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme:
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 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.”
First and foremost, Ms Badenoch seems to have developed convenient amnesia about the deadly seriousness of Covid in the first stages of the pandemic. Contracting the disease could mean your own death, the death of loved ones, or, indeed, long term debilitating illness. That surely justified the rule regime that was in place.
But the biggest case of amnesia concerns Ms Badenoch seemingly forgetting what the powers of a Prime Minister are. All the rules about Covid had to get the green light from Boris Johnson. Indeed, he spent at least an hour most days at the media conferences explaining the rules and their rationale.
So, when Kemi Badenoch says that the Covid rules created “a trap for Boris Johnson”, it appears to be a very odd use of the English language.
The only person who “set a trap for Boris Johnson” was the Right Honourable Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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4 Comments
Having a few drinks outside was never a public health risk or a serious risk to the majority of the population. The government introduced a bunch of strange rules (the rule of six being the strangest) simply because they didn’t trust the public to exercise common sense when meeting others. That’s the damaging part of Partygate – the Tories think the public are idiots.
Good to see Kemi B supports recycling failed conservative leadership hopefuls rejected by their own members into her shadow cabinet, these retreads with a history of letting the voters down should keep her party in opposition forever and a day .
Ultimately, the lockdowns will be proven to be infinitely worse than the disease…
The 2m rule was fantasy stuff – totally ridiculous….The publics patience was exhausted on the 2nd lockdown – when rules were being openly flouted ….
Reasonable people can have a range of views about the rules themselves, though speaking as someone with a level of clinical vulnerability pre-vaccine, I hesitate to indulge in the retrospective sanguinity of some. The hypocrisy is what hurts, and the subsequent multiple shameless lies in parliament. Badenoch’s framing of it as a trap is vile.