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........

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