The Covid lockdowns turned Boris Johnson into Oliver Cromwell, making him only the second British leader to have cancelled Christmas, Conservative leadership candidate James Cleverly has said.
In a Q&A with the Spectator, the four leadership hopefuls – Cleverly, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat – were asked: “What’s the least conservative policy of the past 14 years?” Cleverly said:
I suppose all of us have got to recognise that our response to Covid was inherently interventionist… the social restrictions that we introduced, I think all of us now look back and say that was far, far, far too much. It was the Conservative party and we cancelled Christmas. I mean Boris Johnson and Oliver Cromwell, the two national leaders who in our history cancelled Christmas and you wouldn’t have expected the Venn diagram of Oliver Cromwell and Boris Johnson to have had much of a crossover.
Somewhat encouragingly, Tom Tugendhat simply replied “Vaccine passports. That’s why I voted against it.” Give that man a badge.
Read the full Q&A here, where the candidates also give their take on the ECHR and immigration.
In a nutshell: Jenrick thinks we have to leave and doesn’t accept it can be reformed or that ‘derogation’ or partial opt-out is possible; Tugendhat supports derogation and says that’s what other countries do; Badenoch is open to leaving but thinks since other countries in the ECHR deport more asylum seekers than us it must be possible; and Cleverly just limply implies that border control is an impossible problem, noting the U.S. fails at it too.
My main thought was: if ‘derogation’ is possible, why didn’t the Tories do it at some point over the past 14 years? But then, you could ask that about a whole heap of things.
Stop Press: The Government overstated the danger of Covid to the public at the start of the pandemic, Professor Chris Whitty admitted to the Covid Inquiry today. He said:
I was worried at the beginning. I still worry, actually in retrospect, about whether we got the level of concern right.
Were we either over pitching it so that people were incredibly afraid of something where in fact, their actuarial risk was low, or we were not pitching it enough and therefore people didn’t realise the risk they were walking into.
I think that balance is really hard, and arguably, some people would say we, if anything we overdid it, rather than under the beginning.
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