Kemi Badenoch faced Wednesday's challenge from a former neo-Nazi convicted of criminal offences after defending a decision she would have thought unthinkable for a conservative party leader a generation ago: standing behind a former convicted neo-Nazi to be a local councillor in southwest England. It is a fight over redemption, political desperation and how little room is left for the Conservative Party as it loses grip of both their support and public tolerance as it cedes to Reform UK.

Now aged 33, Joshua Bonehill-Paine will contest the newly created Tories ward of Crewkerne South for the Conservatives on the Somerset council. He hasn't been denied his past. He was arrested and jailed in 2015 for over three years for uploading antisemitism online ahead of a planned far-right gathering in the north London borough of Golders Green, which has a large Jewish community. He was convicted a year later at the Old Bailey court for racially aggravated harassment of Labour MP Luciana Berger in a series of blog posts describing her as an "evil money-grabber" and raising doubts about the number of Jewish Labour MPs in Parliament. He has admitted to being a "proud antisemite and white nationalist politician," in his own words as reported at the time. He has previously been convicted of burgling a Chard, Somerset police station with his membership card of the Conservative Party after he was drunk when he first sought to become a Tory candidate in 2011.

In his appearances on the BBC's Today programme and subsequent re-broadcasts all day, Badenoch was confident that he had two arguments to make to support his claim: he said his conduct in the past was "appalling and abhorrent", and a seat on a parish-level council is not nearly as risky as a seat on a national platform. She said it was not a national platform, adding that the issues of parking and bins were not issues that Somerset councillors were expected to be dealing with, let alone immigration and foreign policy. She pointed to Bonehill-Paine's subsequent work with Prevent, the government's anti-radicalization program, and noted he has been certified by the Home Office to train police officers on antisemitism and extremism. Her framing juxtaposed forgiveness, which she said no one deserves, with rehabilitation, which she said the state has already "certified" by his post-prison record.

It has not convinced the people who are most affected. Baroness Berger wrote on social media that she did not know about the decision until it was made public, and that the content Bonehill-Paine published about her "far exceeded the five blog posts which led to my conviction, including racist, misogynistic material. The Jewish Labour Movement described the choice as "truly appalling. Any would-be candidate who has been found guilty of multiple felonies and created a organisation named National British Resistance "beggars belief" that the Board of Deputies of British Jews would want to present him, it said. Indeed, even Nigel Farage of Reform UK, who sparked news in the last 18 months by attracting Tory disaffection, got in a shot at Badenoch's "new batch" of Conservative candidates, asking rhetorically: "Is this part of the "new generation" of candidates that Badenoch has promised us?

The timing matters. The controversy coincides with the release by the Community Security Trust which monitors and assists in the security of Britain's approximately 280,000 Jews of its half-year figures, which show 1,926 antisemitic incidents were recorded between January and June, up 21 percent from the same period last year and the second highest for a half-year ever. Assaults rose to a record level for the period and the number of incidents related to school increased 59 per cent compared to the previous year. The pattern was similar to the buildup of the US-Israel conflict with Iran earlier this year, which culminated in a stabbing in late April of two Jewish men in Golders Green, Mark Gardner, the chief executive of the charity, said. The government has made separate £250m funding for further protection at synagogues, schools and community centres available over three years, and the money has increased over the past three years since the start of the October 2023 threats. Given that history, it is tone-deaf at best for a party leader to stand out in public and attest to the suitability of a former hate-crime convict for office.

Under the ethical one there's also a more difficult political calculation. In May's Mayoral and Council elections, the Conservatives suffered their worst result in decades, losing over 250 seats as Reform UK swept in to seats that had been held reliably by Tories for years, and even into traditional Labour strongmen. Most national polls have indicated that a hypothetical Reform-Conservative combination is better than either party separately, and the Reform party has seen its support level diminish since the launch of a new hard-right platform, Restore Britain, has split the right-wing vote. Each of the local candidates now has an exaggerated symbolic value for a party striving to regain any sense of identity than Reform, rather than simply courting Farage's voters into an area that will alienate the social and minority community votes the Tories need to regenerate. But voters in one Somerset ward are to be left to sort out the two things, as Badenoch believes that Bonehill-Paine's past is not his party's problem to brand themselves with. But Jewish organisations and slowly more commentators are less convinced that the distinction will remain once the story crosses the lines of the City of Crewkerne.