One of the great mysteries of the universe is how Kemi Badenoch wins such positive reviews.
If you read most commentary about her, you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was the great saviour of the Conservative Party, rather than the leader that just presided over them falling to fifth place in the Greater Manchester mayoral election.
Her latest act of political ingenuity is to knowingly invite a convicted neo-Nazi and antisemite to join the party as a candidate. It is an act of stupefying irresponsibility, involving a series of untenable moral propositions which she has defended as incompetently as possible.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine is the creator of the Crewkerne Gazette, a supposedly satirical online outlet which in fact is just AI slop praising Badenoch and attacking her opponents. The Times called it the “Banksy of politics”. In fact, Banksy is the Banksy of politics and the Crewkerne Gazette is just the excretion of an AI engine fed a series of dimwitted prompts.
Badenoch spends an awful lot of time on X.com, which is probably how she spotted Bonehill-Paine’s AI content. But the Gazette is the least of his failures. In 2015, he was jailed for three years after an attempt to organise a rally against “the complete Jewification” of the Jewish neighbourhood of Golders Green. A year later he was found guilty of racially aggravated harassment against Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger, who he branded “a rodent” and an “evil money-grabber”.
When he was released from prison he apparently carried out counter-extremism work. This is all well and good, but it does not mean that you would want him as a Conservative candidate. And yet this is the decision Badenoch made when she approved him to stand for the Somerset Council election.
The Tory leader appeared on Radio 4 this morning and delivered one of the most hopeless political interviews in recent memory. She is either so stupid that she does not understand the logical fallacies she was uttering or so cynical that she will say anything to defend her position.
The first problem she faced was one of double standards. Last month, Badenoch orchestrated a purge of the Conservative parliamentary party, insisting that anyone who still believed in Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) or net zero was to be blocked from standing as a candidate at the next election. It was a concerted effort to eradicate any remaining lingering elements of moderation or good judgement from the party.
She is now in the frankly insane position of refusing to accept former Tory MPs Grant Shapps or Gavin Barwell as representatives, but enthusiastically giving the all-clear to a former neo-Nazi.
In order to defend against this criticism, Badenoch reached for a revealing argument. “I’m not giving him a national platform, he is standing to be a councillor in Somerset,” she said. “It is a local platform, looking at parking, sorting out bins, that’s what councillors do… I have much higher thresholds for what it takes to be a Conservative MP.”
Her disparaging assessment of local politics will have offended Conservative councillors across the country, with its easy-to-spot snootiness about “looking at parking, sorting out bins”. Councillors deserve more respect than this – they make decisions which have a real identifiable impact on the quality of people’s lives. They should not be subject to some kind of second-tier scrutiny, like the political equivalent of broken biscuits sold from a jar by the till.
Even simply as a point of internal party management, it was a foolhardy thing to say. You don’t want to disparage your councillors. These are the people who come out to fight for you at an election – trudging out the door on a rainy Sunday morning, stuffing leaflets through letterboxes. You need to motivate them, not insult them.
On its own terms, Badenoch’s comment made no sense. She claimed she “had a much higher threshold” for being a Conservative MP than a Conservative councillor. We have to hope that these were just meaningless words leaving her mouth at random. If they express her true moral position then God help us all, because they suggest that she thinks a criminal record for neo-Nazism and antisemitism is less serious than believing in the ECHR or net zero.
Having committed this cognitive atrocity, Badenoch went off on an exploration of all the wildest farragos of nonsense available to the human mind. She articulated a series of false comparisons, each weaker than the last.
Labour MPs complaining about the appointment were hypocrites, she suggested. Why? Because “Andy Burnham has Louise Haigh, who is a convicted fraudster, in his Cabinet.” Haigh was involved in a silly mess about the loss of a work phone in 2014. Even on the worst possible reading of the evidence against her, it is trivial. Bonehill-Paine was convicted of harassment and neo-Nazism. These are not equivalent failures.
Having attempted to make a comparison with the lowest possible end of the criminal spectrum, Badenoch attempted to make one with the highest. She referenced Labour’s policy of releasing prisoners during their sentence to free up jail spaces and said: “I don’t think we should block [extremists who have been rehabilitated] because if we do, how can we say that it’s alright to release the killers and the rapists and the paedophiles?”
Out she went, diligently gathering apples in order to compare them to oranges. Releasing someone from prison early is not equivalent to thinking they would make a suitable candidate for your party. One is a policy choice forced on a government by mismanagement of the prison estate. The other is the active and willing selection of a party representative. You might as well try to fix a laptop by cleaning it with washing-up liquid.
Badenoch is clearly not up to it intellectually and unable to operate convincingly in political life. But her clown car antics have a debilitating impact on our national culture.
She is helping to undermine the moral norms around racism and Nazism. These are the best line of defence against the most dangerous political ideas: the widely held principle, shared across society, that racists should be shunned and vilified. By accepting figures like Bonehill-Paine into the Tory party, she works to undermine them. That is an action which is worth not just of mockery, but of disgrace.
Badenoch is a joke, but her actions are deadly serious. Her continued presence as Tory leader undermines the party and corrodes public life.
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