Under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the Conservative Party appears to be developing a rather unusual set of rules about who deserves a second chance — and who does not. Former extremists can find a path back into politics, while Conservatives who want to maintain Britain’s net zero commitments can find themselves shut out.
Joshua Bonehill-Paine has an especially ugly political history. He served two prison sentences for antisemitic offences and targeted Luciana Berger, then a Jewish Labour MP, describing her as a “rodent” and an “evil money-grabber”. He also produced a poster promoting an “anti-Jewification” march in Golders Green, describing it as an “absolute gas”.
He went further still, founding the neo-Nazi National British Resistance party. He was later convicted of assaulting a police officer and of burgling a police station.
That, however, is apparently history as far as Kemi Badenoch is concerned.
When it emerged this week that Bonehill-Paine had been selected as a Conservative candidate in a council election in Somerset, Badenoch came to his defence. Although she has generally presented herself as sceptical about political rehabilitation, she said she believed Bonehill-Paine had changed and deserved the opportunity to stand.
“Piling on them and trying to get them cancelled may be sport for other parties, but this is a different Conservative party,” she said.
It was a curious argument to choose to fight over. Bonehill-Paine subsequently withdrew his candidacy, only to emerge with another role: advising Badenoch on tackling extremism. Berger described the appointment as an insult.
There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with giving people a second chance. Indeed, it can be a profoundly important principle. The problem is the apparent inconsistency in when Badenoch chooses to apply it.
When Keir Starmer gave Louise Haigh a second chance by appointing her transport secretary in 2024, despite her having been convicted of fraud by false representation a decade earlier, Badenoch attacked him in the Commons.
“This country needs conviction politicians, not politicians with convictions,” she said.
It was a memorable line. But there was little room in it for the idea of rehabilitation.
A complicated record on racism
Badenoch has also appeared uncertain about how to respond when racism emerges within her own party.
Take the controversy surrounding Conservative donor Frank Hester. Hester was accused of saying that Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”. He later said he accepted that he had been rude about Abbott but denied that his comments had anything to do with her gender or skin colour.
Hester had donated £10m to the Conservatives, creating an awkward question for the party. Should it return the money? Should Hester be condemned and excluded, or should he be given another chance?
Badenoch, who was business secretary at the time, described Hester’s comments as racist. Yet only days later she dismissed the controversy as “pure media bubble speculation”, arguing that it was not what voters cared about and that Britain needed to stop “looking everywhere for the racism”.
The £10m remained with the Conservatives.
Hester, too, received his second chance. Perhaps, one might wonder, he could now join Bonehill-Paine as an adviser on extremism.
But the confusion over Badenoch’s vision for the party does not end there.
Net zero becomes a Conservative red line
The other issue on which Badenoch appears prepared to take a stand is net zero.
Polling consistently suggests that around 60% of Britons support the UK’s commitment to reach net zero by 2050. Even among Conservative voters, support stands at roughly 48%, although it is hardly enthusiastic.
Yet as southern Europe experienced another summer of devastating fires, Badenoch reaffirmed her decision to prevent anyone who refuses to support her plan to scrap the net zero targets agreed by Theresa May in 2019 from standing as a Conservative candidate.
There is certainly a legitimate debate to be had about net zero, including whether the 2050 deadline is realistic. But under Badenoch’s Conservatives, that debate appears to have little room to exist.
The reported exclusion of Grant Shapps is particularly striking. Shapps served in six Cabinet positions under different prime ministers and remains a prominent Conservative figure. Yet he is reportedly being prevented from standing again because of his disagreement with Badenoch over net zero and, apparently, the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Lord Gavin Barwell appears to have suffered a similar fate.
A former Downing Street chief of staff under Theresa May, Barwell made a relatively mild criticism of Badenoch’s ban on candidates who support net zero. He subsequently discovered that he had lost the Conservative whip in the Lords after a friend sent him a Daily Mail article reporting the decision.
Barwell argued that the move demonstrated an intolerance of criticism. During three decades working for the party, he said, he had served under John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard, David Cameron and Theresa May — and none had removed the whip from a colleague simply for challenging their strategy.
His broader point was simple: good leaders should be able to hear different opinions, distinguish unfair attacks from legitimate criticism and learn from the latter.
It is difficult to argue with that.
From broad church to political exclusion
The Conservative Party once took pride in being a broad church. Increasingly, however, it appears to have become comfortable with political exclusion.
The process did not begin with Badenoch. Boris Johnson accelerated it when he effectively decided that his interpretation of conservatism was more legitimate than that of figures such as Michael Heseltine.
During the Brexit battles, a succession of mainstream Conservative MPs were pushed out of the party for opposing a no-deal departure from the European Union. Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Oliver Letwin, Nicholas Soames and Ed Vaizey were among those who found themselves on the wrong side of the party leadership.
History may ultimately prove them right on Brexit. But that did not save their place in the Conservative Party.
Badenoch could, in theory, try to rebuild some of those bridges. Michael Heseltine is now 93. David Gauke and Dominic Grieve remain former Conservatives. Rory Stewart and Matthew Parris represent a different strand of the centre-right.
Would it not make political sense to bring some of them back into the conversation? They need not agree with Badenoch. They could disagree vigorously while still recognising that they belong to a broader conservative tradition.
The problem is that Badenoch does not appear interested in such a reconciliation.
Whether that reflects stubbornness, insecurity, arrogance or simply a belief that ideological clarity is more important than internal diversity is difficult to say. But it is likely to be frustrating for a substantial group of instinctively centre-right voters who increasingly feel that they have nowhere to go politically.
The voters caught in the middle
That matters because pollsters broadly agree that there is a significant pool of voters occupying what might be called the “disillusioned centre”.
These are people who are not necessarily attracted to traditional left-wing economic policies, but who are equally uncomfortable with populist social conservatism, hostility towards the green transition and uncompromising anti-immigration rhetoric.
For Badenoch, distancing the Conservatives from Reform UK is clearly sensible. But attacking Nigel Farage’s party as “woke”, as she did this week, seems less convincing.
It may have generated a useful headline during the political quiet of summer. But for most voters, “wokeness” is unlikely to rank among Farage’s most pressing problems.
Badenoch says she has seen genuine repentance in Bonehill-Paine and believes he deserves another opportunity.
Perhaps she would win more support by extending the same spirit of reconciliation to the Conservative politicians and voters who have been cast out of the party’s political wilderness.
The Conservative Party may need fewer tests of ideological purity — and a much wider definition of who is allowed back in.
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