Kemi Badenoch has one standard for MPs and another for Somerset!

The leader of the Conservative Party went on national radio this week to defend her party’s selection of a former neo-Nazi as a council candidate in Somerset.

She lost the argument twice. Once on Joshua Bonehill-Paine. Once on Somerset

“That’s what councillors do”

Joshua Bonehill-Paine was jailed for three years in 2015 for posting antisemitic material ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally, and was convicted of racially harassing the then Labour MP Luciana Berger. He has been selected to fight Crewkerne South for the Conservatives next year.

Pressed on whether that was a sound judgement, Kemi Badenoch’s defence was, in essence, that it doesn’t really count. Somerset Council, she explained, is “a local platform looking at parking, sorting out bins.”

“That’s what councillors do.”

And then the line that should be printed on every leaflet in this county between now and polling day:

“I have much higher thresholds for what it takes to be a Conservative MP.”

Higher standards for Westminster. Lower standards for Somerset.

Somerset is not simply a parish notice board Kemi!

Somerset Council is a unitary authority. That means everything. More than half a million residents. 110 councillors. A net revenue budget of around half a billion pounds, roughly two thirds of it spent on social care and children’s services, and a £25 million gap we had to close this year.

What that actually means, week to week:

• Whether an elderly woman in Shepton Mallet gets a care package, or waits.
• Whether a child with SEND gets a school place, or doesn’t.
• Whether a family is placed in temporary accommodation two counties away.
• Whether homes get consent on a flood plain.
• Whether a village floods again this winter.
• Child protection. Corporate parenting. Public health. Highways. Licensing. Safeguarding.

I’ve been a councillor here since 2022. As Vice Chair of Adults and Health Scrutiny I’ve worked to get suicide prevention onto our work programme. As Associate Lead Member for Community Resilience I work on flood funding and getting parishes prepared before the water arrives. My casework runs from immigration to damp housing to road safety on the A371.

Bins matter too!

Ask any resident whose collection has been missed. But bins are one of the things we do, not the sum of it.

“How do you know he’s been rehabilitated?”

That was the interviewer’s question. It’s the right one.

The answer: “because of what he’s doing now.”

But a large part of what he’s doing now is producing AI deepfake videos of politicians — including, the interviewer pointed out, ones supportive of her.

Her response? “I don’t watch the videos.”

So the test for rehabilitation is what he’s doing now. And she hasn’t looked at what he’s doing now.

Public life is public life

Rehabilitation is real and it matters. I believe in second chances. Whether someone has genuinely changed is a serious question and it deserves a serious answer.

But “has he changed?” and “should he be on the ballot paper?” are two different questions, and Kemi Badenoch skipped straight over the first to answer the second.

Because a councillor is not a member of the public who has served their time. A councillor holds power. We sit on planning and licensing. We hold statutory safeguarding duties. We are the corporate parents of children in care. We are the people residents come to when they have nowhere else to go — including Jewish residents. Including the kind of people he once wrote about.

“I do not minimise that at all,” she said. And then she minimised it.

The insult

“The people of Somerset may decide that they don’t want him.”

We might well. But that isn’t the point.

The point is that the leader of the Conservative Party looked at Somerset — half a million people, half a billion pounds, hundreds of the hardest decisions in public life — and saw somewhere the bar could safely be lowered.

Somerset isn’t the shallow end of politics. It’s where politics actually lands.

We deserve better than being somebody’s low bar.