Kemi Badenoch is not a fool, said Tom Harris in The Telegraph; nor is she remotely an antisemite. So why did she stick her neck out for Joshua Bonehill-Paine, the former neo-Nazi who’d hoped to stand as a Tory councillor in Somerset?
Having served time in jail for waging a repulsive campaign of racial hatred against the former Labour MP Luciana Berger, Bonehill-Paine claims to be a reformed character, dedicated to fighting antisemitism.
And perhaps he is – but that didn’t make it appropriate for him to stand for office, especially when he hadn’t even apologised to Berger for what he termed “Operation Filthy Jew Bitch”.
Belief in ‘second chances’?
Yet when his candidacy was being condemned by all sides last week, said Harris, Badenoch defended it; and when he withdrew it, she gave him a role as an adviser on radicalisation instead. The Tory leader is savvy enough to have seen the risk to her reputation. So the only possible explanation for her apparent poor judgement is that she believes in second chances – and has the courage to stick to her principles, even if they make her unpopular.
I don’t buy it, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman. Her belief in “second chances” was not in evidence in 2024, when it emerged that the Labour minister Louise Haigh had been convicted of fraud a decade ago. We need “conviction politicians”, she said, “not politicians with convictions”.
Yet Haigh’s offence – falsely reporting the theft of a mobile phone – was as nothing compared with Bonehill-Paine’s (who also has a conviction for assault). Unwisely, Badenoch tried to further justify his candidacy by saying he’d only sought a local platform – “looking at parking and sorting out bins” – thus insulting her existing councillors at the same time.
‘Wider concerns’ about strategy
In May, Badenoch impressed many by taking a clear stand against antisemitism, said Kate Maltby in The Observer. Yet last week found her supporting a former neo-Nazi – presumably because she’d decided that the Tories needed his Crewkerne Gazette platform, known for its viral AI videos mocking Labour, to be on its side.
This row has revived “wider concerns” about her entire strategy of tacking to the right, said Kitty Donaldson in The i Paper. Only days earlier, Badenoch had warned that ex-centrist MPs – who support net-zero targets, or don’t want the UK to leave the ECHR – won’t be allowed back into the parliamentary party. But while she seeks to win votes from Reform UK, her critics argue that, for an outright majority, the Tories need to win back the seats they’ve lost to the Lib Dems. Time will tell who is right, but for now, the One Nation lot are well and truly out in the cold.