Kemi Badenoch squirms in car-crash interview over the former neo-Nazi who’s standing as a Tory candidate

Kemi Badenoch’s day didn’t get off to a good start. This morning, she appeared on the BBC Today Programme for an interview she hoped would focus on the government’s early release scheme.

While Tory criminal justice policy did make up a portion of the interview, inevitably the BBC spent quite a bit of time on the fact that the Tories have selected Joshua Bonehill-Paine – a former neo-Nazi who has a number of convictions for his activities in the 2010s.

Bonehill-Paine has been selected as a Tory candidate in Somerset. His convictions – for which he was imprisoned – include inciting racial hatred against Jews and aggravated racial harassment. The latter conviction was for material he had written about the then Labour MP Luciana Berger.

In the BBC interview, the presenter Justin Webb asked her: “He was convicted, he went to prison, he is now apparently going to stand for your party as as councillor in Somerset – why?”

While Badenoch initially said that Bonehill-Paine’s previous actions were ‘appalling’ and ‘abhorrent’, she went on to defend him being selected as a candidate.

Badenoch told the BBC: “This is a man who is talking about how in his late teens and early twenties he was radicalised, he became a racist and an antisemite. And he is training – certified by the Home Office – training people on how to deal with that.”

Later in the interview, Badenoch justified his selection on the basis that the Tories weren’t giving him a ‘national platform’.

She told the BBC: “I’m not giving him a national platform. He is standing to be a councillor in Somerset”.

When pressed on the fact that selecting someone to be a council candidate is giving someone a platform, Badenoch conceded that she was giving him a ‘local platform’, before saying that she had ‘much higher thresholds for what it takes to be a Conservative MP’.

Badenoch – it appears – was referring to the new rules she has created which will prevent people who support the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) or the UK’s target to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 from becoming a Tory parliamentary candidate.

As if the interview wasn’t going bad enough, that’s when it hit rock bottom. Webb asked Badenoch simply: “What is it that allows you to be a representative of the Conservative Party in the public sphere – ie. being a former neo-Nazi doesn’t matter, not liking the ECHR is a must?”

Running out of road, Badenoch then went on to deflect from her candidate by attacking the Labour Party. She criticised the prime minister for appointing Louise Haigh to his cabinet, branding her a ‘convicted fraudster’, and argued that because Labour had – in 2012 – also selected a former neo-Nazi as a council candidate that Bonehill-Paine’s selection this year was justified.

Concluding the interview, she defended the decision once again, claiming that the former neo-Nazi was now ‘fighting for Jewish people’.

She said: “At a local level, where someone is actively working on anti-radicalisation, fighting for Jewish people knowing the harm he caused – he did a lot of terrible things, I do not minimise that at all, this is a judgement call – and I think in this case I do think he should be allowed to stand.”

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward