Joshua Bonehill-Paine was a nasty piece of work. He served two jail sentences for vile antisemitism, and harassed Luciana Berger, then a Jewish MP, calling her a “rodent” and an “evil money-grabber”. He created a poster for an “anti-Jewification” march in Golders Green, saying it would be an “absolute gas”.
That’s not all. He founded a neo-Nazi party, National British Resistance, and has a further conviction for assaulting a police officer and the burglary of a police station.
But that was then. Today his biggest fan is Kemi Badenoch, who came out fighting for him when it was revealed this week that he’d been selected by the Conservatives to contest a council election in Somerset. Badenoch, normally (she says) sceptical about rehabilitation, decided that Bonehill-Paine had turned over a new leaf and should be allowed to stand.
“Piling on them and trying to get them cancelled may be sport for other parties, but this is a different Conservative party,” she said.
It was an odd hill for Badenoch to die on and, unsurprisingly enough, Bonehill-Paine promptly decided to cancel himself. He stepped down as the candidate but then announced that he had been given a new role advising Badenoch on combating extremism. Berger described the appointment as an insult. Well, where to start?
Giving people a second chance in life can certainly be a good thing. If only Badenoch had welcomed Keir Starmer’s decision to allow Louise Haigh a second chance when he appointed her transport secretary in 2024 despite her conviction for fraud by false misrepresentation ten years earlier.
But, no. Badenoch savaged Starmer in the House of Commons. “This country needs conviction politicians, not politicians with convictions,” she snapped. Nice soundbite, but no rehabilitation for Haigh.
When confronted with disgusting racism within her own party, Badenoch has sometimes given the impression of being confused. You may remember the row over a Tory donor, Frank Hester, who said that Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot.” (Hester has said that he “accepts that he was rude about Diane Abbott in a private meeting several years ago but his criticism had nothing to do with her gender nor colour of skin.”)
Mr Hester had given the Tories £10m, and some unkind people suggested the money should be returned—doubtless a ticklish moment for the party. Should they cancel Hester, or give him a second chance?
Badenoch, then business secretary, declared the remarks to be racist. But within a few days she dismissed the row over his remarks as “pure media bubble speculation. It is not what the country cares about. This is trivia… we need to get to a place where we stop chasing people around and looking everywhere for the racism.”
The £10m was safe. Hester got a second chance. Perhaps he could join Bonehill-Paine in advising the Tory leader on fighting extremism?
But this is only the start of the confusion about what kind of party Badenoch is trying to shape. For the other hill on which Badenoch has chosen to die is net zero.
Most polling suggests that nearly two-thirds of us (around 60 per cent) support the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Almost half of people identifying as Tories (48 per cent) support it, albeit in a lukewarm fashion.
But, even as southern Europe went up in flames, Badenoch reaffirmed her moratorium on any candidate who does not sign up to her pledge to scrap the net zero targets her predecessor, Theresa May, agreed to in June 2019.
Reasonable people might agree there is a debate to be had about net zero and whether 2050 is a realistic timescale. But not in Badenoch’s Tory party. That debate has been cancelled.
You may or may not admire Grant Shapps, who held no fewer than six cabinet roles under successive prime ministers, but it is odd, to say the least, that Badenoch has reportedly banned him from standing again because he disagrees with her over net zero (and, probably, exiting the European Court of Human Rights).
The same fate has apparently befallen [Lord] Gavin Barwell, an affable and popular former Downing Street chief of staff under May. Barwell tweeted some mild criticism over Badenoch’s ban on net zero advocates. He found out that he had been kicked out of the Conservative party in the Lords when a friend forwarded an article to that effect from the Daily Mail.
“The decision to take the Whip away from me suggests an intolerance of criticism,” he posted on LinkedIn. “During my 30 years working for the party, I served John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard, David Cameron and Theresa May. None of them would have removed the Whip from a colleague simply for being critical of the strategy they were pursuing.
“The best leaders are those who welcome different voices, not letting unfair attacks bother them but acknowledging and learning from valid criticism. No one has a monopoly of wisdom.”
He’s right, isn’t he? But the Conservative party, which used to pride itself on being a broad church, has become rather addicted to cancel culture. It began with Boris Johnson, who had the authoritarian cheek to presume that he, not Michael Heseltine, understood the conservative tradition in this country. Hezza was cancelled.
Within months, a host of other mainstream Conservative MPs were heading for the exit. Such dangerously extreme figures as Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Oliver Letwin, Nicholas Soames and Ed Vaizey were kicked out for opposing a no-deal Brexit. There’s little doubt that history will judge they were right on this issue—but, meh.
Could Badenoch not have found it in her heart to forge a rapprochement with Hezza, now 93? Or find some warm words for the still-cancelled David Gauke or Dominic Grieve?
Would it not be canny politics to invite former MPs Rory Stewart or Matthew Parris in for a coffee and, while acknowledging their differences, insist that they are all broadly pointing in the same direction?
The truth is, she can’t. Is it obstinacy? Insecurity? Arrogance? Narrow-mindedness? Who can say. But it must be dismaying to a large swathe of instinctively centre-right voters who find themselves politically homeless.
It’s especially odd since pollsters seem to agree that the “disillusioned centre” should be fertile ground: voters who are not in love with traditional left-wing economic policies, but who also feel alienated by populist social conservatism, green-transition scepticism and hardline anti-immigration rhetoric.
It’s obviously sensible for Badenoch to distance herself from Reform. But to denounce them, as she did this week, as “woke” is just silly. It got her a headline in the dull days of a parched summer. But most people would think that “being woke” is the least of Nigel Farage’s problems just now.
There is more joy in heaven, and so on. Badenoch claims to have seen genuine repentance in Joshua Bonehill-Paine. But she would surely win more friends by being less doctrinaire and more welcoming to the other so-called sinners who have been cast out and remain in the wilderness.
