In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, looks at Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a former neo-nazi who has since turned his life around, and who was selected as a Conservative council candidate, but withdrew under pressure. 

Politics is fractured across the political spectrum. Any party that can get its vote share as high as 30% is just about certain to be leading in the polls and will likely be on track to win the next election. Whether the election is won by a broad bloc on the left or a broad bloc on the right could depend on (a) one party clearly becoming the standard bearer on their side of the ledger (that looks eminently achievable for Labour, the right-of-centre side of the ledger looks rather messier) or (b) the extent to which parties of a broadly similar view are able to co-operate in some fashion or other.

This raises a whole raft of challenging strategic questions which revolve around the key question of how big and wide you want your tent to be and where exactly you want to pitch it.

Kemi Badenoch had an interesting week in this regard. She and the Conservative Party became embroiled over the case of (the rather wonderfully named) Joshua Bonehill-Paine who had put his name forward as a Tory local election candidate in Somerset. Bonehill-Paine has served prison time for his neo-Nazi activities (including the harassment of Labour peer, Luciana Berger, in 2016).

Bonehill-Paine is now a reformed man. Although it is true that a number of commentators and members of the Jewish community question whether he has shown sufficient contrition and remorse, no one doubts that he has left his extremist past behind him and has taken some meaningful initial steps to make amends.

Kemi’s view is that we live in a world of second chances and we should count it as a success that those who have been on the extreme racist fringes of politics can pilot a way back. She was therefore content for him to run under the Conservative banner.

Following a public backlash (based around Bonehill-Paine’s rehabilitation being far from complete rather than it being sincere), he decided to stand down as a candidate in Somerset but he will take on an advisory role to the party leader.

I have been asked in several media interviews this week what I made of Kemi’s embrace of Joshua Bonehill-Paine. I said I was highly sympathetic to her position. Assuming his conversion is sincere (and nobody seems to doubt this), his past should not act as an absolute barrier to a role in public life. I was a bit surprised that he hadn’t gone through a rather slower, more public display of contrition (perhaps by giving a speech at Tory conference and/or doing a sit down online interview) – but those are matters of execution rather than principle.

I found it a little grating therefore that last week Kemi also took the step of underlining again that there were no conceivable circumstances in which she could imagine working with Nigel Farage and Reform. If, despite his past, Joshua Bonehill-Paine is the sort of person Kemi Badenoch is happy to work with, it’s a little mystifying that she can see no circumstances in which she would collaborate with Farage. Some of this is just the “grammar” of political discourse – you are seen to fatally undermine your own position if you say anything other than that you are supremely confident that you can win and govern without assistance. It is sometimes said that working arrangements between competing political parties are impossible until they become inevitable.

Nevertheless, somehow at some point a bigger, united tent on the right is going to need to be constructed.  Some believe that the Reform surge is just a bubble that will eventually pop. Others feel the Conservative Party is in terminal and irreversible decline and any modest uptick in a given poll is merely a dead cat bounce. Perhaps one or other of these theories is right and one of these parties will emerge as the unambiguous, leading standard bearer of the right-of-centre. But perhaps both are wrong. In that scenario, keeping doors open rather than closing them off is surely a necessary part of a sensible strategy.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!