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A former MP has urged the Tory leader to drop an election candidate who was previously jailed for a campaign of antisemitic abuse against her.
Kemi Badenoch on Tuesday defended the Conservative party’s selection of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a former neo-Nazi, insisting she believes in “second chances”.
Writing on social media, Luciana Berger, who is now a peer, said: “For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t believe this man should have *any* role in public life – because of both his racism and his view of women.”
Directly addressing the Conservative leader in thread of comments online, Berger said she was still “haunted” by the case and told Badenoch that she had “got this very, very wrong”.
“He was convicted for racial harassment for 5 specific blogs. But that wasn’t all – he’d published *reams* of deeply racist, misogynistic and pornographic material about me,” said Berger. She recalled being six months pregnant when she had to give evidence at the Old Bailey in what she described as “two days of hell”.
“I count myself lucky though. There were other victims whose lives he had totally destroyed,” she added. She said she felt sick reading commentators who were defending the selection.
Bonehill-Paine, the creator of the viral Crewkerne Gazette series of AI clips, is due to stand for election to Somerset council next year.
He told the Guardian on Monday that he was an executive member of the Tories’ Yeovil branch, working as an events organiser, and has carried out counter-extremism work since he was released from prison.
Badenoch said on Tuesday that she was not recruiting neo-Nazis to the Conservative party and that Bonehill-Paine was certified by the Home Office to train police officers on antisemitism and on countering extremism.
“Yes, he is somebody who had been previously convicted for this, but he is someone who has shown contrition for his crimes, has been rehabilitated and is spending every day working to solve the very problem which he knew he had caused previously,” she added.
“He’s going up and down the country training people and the Conservative party believes in second chances.”
But there was criticism from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Labour and others who contrasted Badenoch’s support for Bonehill-Paine with the freezing out of centrist Tories. Former Tory minister Gavin Barwell last month lost the whip after warnings from Badenoch that supporters of policies such as targets for net zero were no longer welcome in the party while former defence secretary Grant Shapps was recently blocked from standing again for the party.
Karen Newman, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told HuffPost: “It beggars belief that any party would select as a candidate a multiply convicted felon and the founder of a far-right group called National British Resistance.”
“We have contacted the Conservative party to set out our concerns and call on them to rescind his selection and review their vetting processes.”
Bonehill-Paine re-emerged in recent years as the creator of the Crewkerne Gazette, a satirical online account, and has a conviction for assaulting a police officer and burglary of a police station. He was convicted in 2014 of malicious communications over an anti-Islam hoax that led to death threats against the owners of a pub in Leicester.
He was jailed in 2015 for more than three years after posting antisemitic material online ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally. In 2016, he was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment of Berger, who is Jewish.
The abuse directed at her was cited by the Jewish Labour Movement, which described Bonehill-Paine’s selection by the Tories as “appalling”.
Bonehill-Paine has meanwhile hit back at Reform UK after its leader, Nigel Farage, joined in the criticism of the Conservatives. An image of email in which Reform thanked him for applying to be a party candidate and informed him that he had passed vetting checks was shared on X by Bonehill-Paine.
He also provided evidence indicating that the chair of Reform’s Yeovil branch had written to him as recently as June to ask if he would like to meet to discuss the prospect of standing for the party.
A Reform UK spokesperson said: “There’s a reason why Mr Bonehill-Paine wasn’t selected as a Reform UK candidate. Meanwhile, while Kemi Badenoch claims to have a new generation of Tory candidates and says she supports the fight against antisemitism, she is selecting a convicted antisemite to stand for the Conservatives. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.”
