Partygate, Lord Hague argues, is a “distraction” from the “greatest period of peril in our lifetimes.”

As he mocked Rishi Sunak’s fine for’showing up to a meeting on time,’ Lord Hague cautioned that Partygate is a ‘distraction’ from the ‘greatest era of catastrophe in our lifetimes.’

Concerns were voiced by the former foreign secretary that lawmakers would lack the ‘bandwidth’ to focus on Ukraine, anticipated food shortages, and the fallout of Covid.

Lord Hague dismissed the argument that the Chancellor should have resigned for mistakenly wandering into a Cabinet Room birthday celebration for Boris Johnson in June 2020, arguing that most blunders in government are made when senior individuals are ‘concentrating on something else.’

ut he appeared to take a veiled swipe at the PM by noting that some politicians will never resign because they ‘think they can get out of anything’.

Asked to rate the geopolitical crisis on a scale of one to 10, Lord Hague said: ‘I’m very concerned. We’re on a scale of seven or eight out of 10 historically speaking I would say. This is certainly the biggest period of crisis in the lifetimes of most of us alive today.

‘Particularly when you add so many things together, when you add the Covid crisis we’ve been through, the Ukraine crisis we are living through now, then there’s a food crisis on top of that, all the gathering problems in relations between the United States and China.

‘This is more of a historical norm of course… we have been through the illusion that history had ended and that problems in the world had been largely abolished the last 20-30 years.

‘That’s why I say it is a 7-8 it’s not a 10. Previous generations lives through the First World War, Second World War.’

The Tory former leader said the Ukraine war was ‘top of the list’ and ‘could easily turn into a wider conflict’.

He expressed concern that domestic politics was ‘really preoccupied’ with Partygate – although he also stressed that was inevitable in a democracy.

‘In government there is only so much bandwidth… The people at the top only have so many hours in the day when they can think about things,’ Lord Hague said.

‘The main reason usually where they make what seems afterwards to be a terrible mistake on something is that they did it in a hurry, they were really concentrating on something else and then something just happened in a great rush where there wasn’t time to question the assumptions.’