Covid-19 lockdowns turned Boris Johnson into Oliver Cromwell, James Cleverly has said. 

The Tory leadership hopeful described the restrictions as being “far, far, far too much” and described them as the least conservative policy of the last 14 years. 

Mr Cleverly made the comments in a Q&A with the other contenders for the leadership published in the Spectator.

The former home secretary, who was a backbencher during the pandemic, 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.”