Kemi Badenoch defends selection of former neo-Nazi as Tory candidate
Nigel Farage criticised Joshua Bonehill-Paine’s selection, unaware he had previously been cleared to stand as a Reform candidate
Kemi Badenoch has defended her party selecting a former neo-Nazi as a local election candidate, saying “the Conservative Party believes in second chances”.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine has been selected as a Conservative candidate in the Somerset local elections next year despite having been jailed in 2015 for racially aggravated harassment.
Badenoch said that “I think people can look at me and know that I’m not a person who would be recruiting neo-Nazis”. She added that Bonehill-Paine had “shown contrition for his crimes”.
Bonehill-Paine was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for racially aggravated harassment of Jewish former Labour MP Luciana Berger.
He wrote a series of posts in support of his jailed former neo-Nazi friend, Garron Helm.
Helm was jailed for writing a tweet in which he attacked Berger for being Jewish, said Hitler was right, and doctored a picture of her to show a yellow Star of David on her forehead.
The blogs about Berger included one with a headline which read “Racist Anti-White Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger Exposed”.
There was an image in the article of Berger’s face superimposed on the body of a rat. In another article, Bonehill-Paine asked “Is the Labour Party a Jewish party?”, which featured the same image of Berger’s face attached to the body of a rat.
He founded far-right group the National British Resistance, and continues to run the ‘Crewkerne Gazette’ X account, which posts “AI slop”.
Badenoch has defended Bonehill-Paine being given “a second chance”, stating that he has now been certified by the Home Office to train police officers on antisemitism and on countering extremism.
“This is not just someone that we’ve picked up who’s a convicted criminal; this is somebody who is actively working to help communities, especially Jewish communities, and this is what I want to see,” Badenoch said.
She added: “I want second chances for good people, for people who’ve learned their lessons, for people who are showing that they know what they did was wrong”.
In a post on X, Nigel Farage reacted to Bonehill-Paine’s selection stating: “Is this part of the “new generation” of Conservative candidates @KemiBadenoch is promising?”.
Farage’s comment backfired when Bonehill-Paine pointed out that he was cleared to stand as a Reform candidate in November 2025, before deciding he would join the Tories instead.
Posting under his pseudonym ‘Crewkerne Man’ on X, Bonehill-Paine wrote: “Last year before I made the excellent decision to rejoin the Conservatives because@KemiBadenoch is great, I foolishly applied to become a Reform councillor and even passed vetting and security.
“Last year Reform were more than happy to have me, I didn’t want them though.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
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