A former neo-Nazi selected by the Conservatives to fight a council election next year has pulled out after a backlash against his candidacy.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine was convicted of racially harassing Jewish former Labour MP Luciana Berger in 2016, while already serving a separate jail sentence for sharing antisemitic posts.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had defended the decision to select him as a candidate for the new Somerset Council seat of Crewkerne South, saying he had been rehabilitated and her party “believes in second chances”.
But Bonehill-Paine said he had now withdrawn his candidacy, and had been offered a position as an anti-extremism adviser to the party.
In a social media post, he said the position with the Conservative Party’s Culture and Integration Commission would focus on advising on how to prevent young men from being radicalised.
Berger, who now sits as Baroness Berger in the House of Lords, branded the appointment an “insult,” adding that making him a party adviser was “no better than allowing him to stand as a council candidate”.
Bonehill-Paine spent three years in prison after he was jailed in 2015 for posting antisemitic material ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally. He was convicted of racially harassing then-Labour MP Berger the following year.
He has described his past views as “indefensible” and says he has spent years opposing antisemitism since leaving prison in 2018.
But the party’s decision to pick him for the Somerset seat sparked a huge political backlash, with Jewish groups declining the offer of a meeting with him.
Baroness Berger, who attended court at the OId Bailey in London to give evidence in Bonehill-Paine’s trial, has said his past behaviour fell “very, very short” of the standard required to stand for public office.
Speaking earlier, she said Bonehill-Paine’s harassment “affected my life in lots of different ways because of the volume of the material that he was disseminating and putting out, the extremity of it in terms of just frankly how shocking and awful it was”.
In sentencing remarks, the judge said it was “difficult to envisage a worse case than this of racially aggravated harassment of this kind”, adding Bonehill-Paine had “sat in the dock smirking throughout the trial” and had “plainly enjoyed” Baroness Berger’s discomfort.
