A Damascene Conversion or a Con. ex-Con's Con?

by Richard Pooley

Joshua Bonehill-Paine. What a name to conjure with! Did it influence the path in life he has taken  (nominative determinism) or is it just well suited to the person he is (an aptonym)?

33-year old Mr B-P only became nationally notorious in the UK on 3 August when it was announced that the Conservative Party had selected him as their candidate in the Somerset ward of Crewkerne for the Somerset Council elections to be held in May next year. I work with the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Frome and East Somerset, Anna Sabine, and am involved in choosing candidates for these elections in her part of the county. So, this news was of some interest to me. But to the whole world?

It was the facts behind the descriptors of Mr B-P in the news reports which got the non-Conservative politicians and commentators fulminating – neo-Nazi, antisemitic,  misogynistic, internet troll, far-right blogger, criminal. The first, second and last sometimes had ex or former as a prefix. More positive was political satirist.

Just two days later Mr B-P announced on X that he was withdrawing from the election next year and that the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, had instead offered him a job as an adviser.

Take a look at Mr B-P’s Wikipedia page (actually 63 pages if you print them; I didn’t). It does not start well:

“Joshua Mark John Bonehill-Paine was born in Yeovil, Somerset.  He went to a public school [Brit-speak for a private one]. After being expelled from school for fighting, his parents put him in the foster care system at the age of 13, missing most of his education before retaking his GCSEs at college.”

After failing at 18 to get selected by the Conservative Party to be their candidate in a local election, he got drunk and broke into a police station, stole a police uniform and assaulted two police officers. A few days later he also “committed criminal damage” to a flowerbed in Yeovil.

It gets worse, much worse. Read the Wikipedia pages if you wish to know more of the hate-filled life of Mr B-P between 2011 and 2015, when he first went to prison for 3 years and 4 months for “inciting racial hatred against Jews”; or 2016, when he was sentenced to an additional 2 years for “racially-aggravated harassment” of Labour MP Luciana Berger, a Jew; or 2017 when he read the Bible in prison, began to question his antisemitic views and attended a deradicalisation course; or May 2018 when he left prison and started lecturing in schools and universities about how wrong antisemitism is.

What did he find in the Bible which made him change so completely the strongly-held opinions and attitudes of his childhood and early adult life? Perhaps it was chapter 13, verse 23 of The Book of Jeremiah: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.”

Or the description in Act 9 of The Acts of the Apostles when that Jewish “Pharisee of Pharisees”, Saul, sent by the High Priest in Jerusalem to arrest Christians in Damascus, was blinded by a light from heaven and heard Jesus telling him to stop persecuting him and his followers. His conversion to Christianity followed and he became St Paul.

Can someone change their spots in such a radical way?  If you have left prison, it is a fact that you are an ex-criminal as long as you commit no further crimes. It is possible to be an ex-neo-Nazi if you are no longer a member of a neo-Nazi party. But can you really be an ex-antisemite? I notice that nobody claimed Mr B-P was an ex-misogynist (he has three children; I hope he treats their mother with respect).

Certainly Mr B-P has led if not a blameless life then a much different one since 2018. He has continued to lecture against antisemitism. According to Wikipedia, he became a cryptocurrency investor and worked as a director of a web services firm. After moving back to Somerset in 2025, he founded The Crewkerne Gazette You Tube channel.

At last Mr B-P had found his calling – political satire. And very funny The Crewkerne Gazette is too. In late June it had 52,000 subscribers; there must be many more now. Views of its short videos, produced almost immediately in response to any event with the help of generative AI, topped 200 million even before all this publicity. Its main targets are the Labour Party nationally and the Liberal Democrats locally (my party are in power in Crewkerne and Somerset). But more and more it skewers Mr B-P’s erstwhile pals on the far right of British politics such as Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe. According to The Times Mr B-P’s fans have given him the moniker of “the Banksy of politics”. Meanwhile, The Times of Israel has called him a “creative wizard” with his “merciless” parodies of British politicians. Mr B-P himself used the channel in February to apologise for his past antisemitism: "I felt very angry at how I treated the Jewish community in this country".

It is Kemi Badenoch’s response to the furore surrounding Mr B-P which is the most interesting. She defended her party’s decision to select him as a candidate (surely knowing how effectively he was drawing support away from her political enemies on the right as well as the left): “Yes, he is somebody who had been previously convicted but he is someone who has shown contrition for his crimes, has been rehabilitated and is spending every day working to solve the very problem which he knew that he had caused previously…the Conservative Party believes in second chances.”

When Mr B-P withdrew his candidacy, Badenoch continued to defend him and her decision to make him an adviser to her party’s Culture and Integration Commission, specifically helping its members understand why and how young men in the UK become radicalised.

If you read Mr B-P’s (“Crewkerne Man” ) lengthy 5th August post on X, you will find it hard not to agree with me that the man is genuine in his renunciation of his past behaviour:

“I was 21 when antisemitism became my whole way of seeing the world. Because of my abhorrent behaviour I was convicted, imprisoned and deservedly punished. Since leaving prison, I have now spent years fighting antisemitism and extremism. Rehabilitation does not erase what I did. But it does give me a sense of duty. While I cannot change my past, I can warn others away from the same destructive path. I know how this ideology works because I lived inside it.”

It’s that first sentence which gives me pause. Long before he was 21 he was exhibiting behaviour which make him totally unfit to be a rational policy maker and implementer, the true role of an effective politician.

Badenoch is right. Mr B-P has been rehabilitated. She was wrong to accept him being her party’s candidate but right to take him on as an adviser. He is doing exactly what he should be doing.

Mind you, although Badenoch must love what Crewkerne Man is doing with his satirical videos, she may want to suggest to her new adviser that he removes part of the Crewkerne Gazette’s defence of its right to free speech: “We are exercising our right to political satire and free expression (protected by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights)”. Badenoch announced in October last year that the UK will leave the E.C.H.R. should she win the next general election. She has also said that anybody who opposed this policy were “not serious” and no longer welcome in the Conservative Party. Those purged include the ex-minister and former chairman of the party, Sir Grant Schapps, who is Jewish.

Might Mr Bonehill-Paine eventually decide that no politician should be exempt from his satire and start mocking Kemi Badenoch and her Tory ilk? Perhaps then his rehabilitation will be truly complete.