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Kemi Badenoch has been clear about the qualifying criteria for prospective Conservative MPs. They must be “serious people who understand common sense,” she has said. The situation in local government is different, as demonstrated by Mrs Badenoch’s ill-judged support for a former neo-Nazi, selected to stand as a councillor in Somerset next year.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine has convictions for racially aggravated harassment of a Jewish Labour MP and assaulting a police officer among other offences. On Wednesday, as pressure grew on the party leader to repudiate him, he withdrew his candidacy.
Mrs Badenoch had defended Mr Bonehill-Paine on the grounds that he had renounced his former views and was involved in anti-extremism training, using his own experience of fanatical antisemitism as a cautionary tale. The Conservative leader said she believed in giving people a second chance.
That is not an ethos she has always applied. When Louise Haigh, currently first secretary of state, resigned from Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet over an old and minor fraud offence, Mrs Badenoch was unforgiving, declaring that “the country needs conviction politicians, not politicians with convictions”.
Mrs Badenoch struggled to justify the inconsistency, claiming that a “higher threshold” applied for MPs than for councillors, whose duties are limited to “parking and bins”. That argument sat awkwardly with the defence of Mr Bonehill-Paine, based on the thoroughness of his rehabilitation. If his anti‑extremism work was exemplary, she might have wanted him to have as wide an audience as possible. Once she accepted that his offences would disqualify him from running for parliament, it was absurd to suggest that Somerset residents should accept a former neo-Nazi running their services. The episode raises questions about the Tory leader’s judgment.
All parties have more rigorous selection tests for MPs than council candidates. The job is more consequential and vetting resources are limited. All have been embarrassed at some point by the exposure of cranks and extremists in their election lists.
But Mrs Badenoch’s contortions in this case reveal a different problem. The Conservatives are struggling to carve out a distinct identity in a fragmented political arena. The leader’s diagnosis of the Tories’ crushing 2024 defeat is that the party “talked right but governed left”. The practical application of this formula involves refusal to challenge Reform UK or its schismatic offshoot, Restore, as they drive immigration policy to ever more extreme positions, and anathematisation of the Tories’ liberal, one-nation tradition.
Mrs Badenoch’s definition of the values and opinions expected of a Tory parliamentary candidate prohibits support for net zero targets or Britain remaining a signatory to the European convention on human rights. Former MPs, including senior ministers, who hold such views are not welcome. Voters who care about the climate or believe that Britain should keep good relations with other European democracies are invited to look elsewhere.
It is not surprising that a strategy of repudiating mainstream, centre-right politics in pursuit of an agenda dictated by radical nationalists has failed to lift Tory support. Since Mrs Badenoch claims to believe in the advancement of “serious people who understand common sense” in politics, she should consider applying that test more rigorously to her own candidacy to be prime minister.
