Congratulations to Joshua Bonehill-Paine, just selected as the new Conservative candidate for Crewkerne South at next year’s elections to Somerset Council.
Bonehill-Paine is just the sort of exciting fresh face Kemi Badenoch’s party is looking for as it seeks to move on from 2024’s record general election defeat and challenge Labour for power. He is the previously anonymous creator of the Crewkerne Gazette, a satirical right wing social media account known for its AI-generated videos which, for example, portray Angela Rayner as a chav and Nigel Farage as a blinged-up rapper.
More importantly, he is also a former neo-Nazi activist with convictions including for harassing a Jewish MP, who has described himself as a “nationalist, fascist, theorist and supporter of white rights”.
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Bonehill-Paine 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 “vile” antisemitic material online ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally, and has a conviction for assaulting a police officer and burgling a police station. Magistrates in Yeovil were told he had used his Conservative Party card to force the lock and told a police officer: “Do you know how I got in? Your security is shit. I got in with my card.”
The same year he attempted to organise a march in the largely Jewish Stamford Hill, North London, against the “Jewification of Great Britain”. He told the Hackney Citizen newspaper at the time he was “a proud antisemite”.
In 2016, he was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment for abuse directed at the then Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish, including calling Berger a “rodent” and an “evil money-grabber” on his blog. He was also the founder and leader of the National British Resistance, a far-right group, telling the Western Gazette: “The National British Resistance party is a nationalist party with ambitions to replace the British National Party and gain mainstream support.”
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Bonehill-Paine told the Guardian this week that his criminal convictions had been spent and that he held “various Home Office counter-extremism certifications”. He said he had spoken alongside MPs where he talked about his past and highlighted antisemitism faced by Britain’s Jewish community.
But the important thing in now being allowed to stand for the Tories is he doesn’t break either of Kemi Badenoch’s two golden rules: he doesn’t believe in Net Zero and is in favour of Britain withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.
A penny for the thoughts of Grant Shapps, then – a former home, defence and business secretary and a man who has never burgled a police station – who was last month barred from standing for the Tories again by Badenoch for the crime of being a bit of a wet!
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