# The Bonehill-Paine affair leaves the Tories with questions to answer

**By:** Rachel Cunliffe  
**Published:** 2026-08-06T06:22:00+01:00  
**Source:** [New Statesman](https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2026/08/the-bonehill-paine-affair-leaves-the-tories-with-questions-to-answer)

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What sort of party wants a former neo-Nazi jailed for antisemitic abuse as a representative?

            

        

        
                        

       

                
        Photo by Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images

What sort of party wants a former neo-Nazi jailed for antisemitic abuse as a representative? That’s the question I can’t stop asking myself with regards to the sorry case of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, inexplicably selected as a Conservative local council candidate in Somerset. After intense backlash, Bonehill-Paine on Wednesday withdrew his candidacy – but both his selection and the Tory party’s initial response to the criticism of their candidate raise some uncomfortable questions. 

“Neo-Nazi” and “antisemitic abuse” are terms that get bandied about a lot in the swirling cesspool of online political discourse, so it’s worth reiterating what Bonehill-Paine actually did. His sustained campaign of antisemitic harassment against the Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger over a three-month period in 2014-5 is meticulously documented in the sentencing remarks of the judge who imposed the maximum sentence for his crimes, saying it was “difficult to envisage a worse case than this of racially aggravated harassment of this kind”.