Joshua Bonehill-Paine is a convicted antisemite.
His appalling campaign of abuse against Baroness Luciana Berger should not be minimised as youthful indiscretion or a regrettable social-media outburst. It was a sustained onslaught of antisemitic and misogynistic harassment that left a Jewish, pregnant Labour MP fearing for her safety.
Berger went on to tell the court during Bonehill-Paine’s trial that she had never been more concerned for her personal safety since becoming an MP. I had the privilege of spending some time with Baroness Berger this past May, when we were both keynote speakers at a new Jewish TED Talks-style event in London called KEN TALKS. Hearing her speak then made it clear now how her experience of cyber abuse likely contributed to her important work on urging the UK government to ban social media use for children under 16.
Berger is right to draw the line between rehabilitation and public office. There is nothing inherently wrong with believing in second chances. Quite the opposite. Someone who has committed terrible acts should not necessarily be condemned to permanent exile from decent society.
In fact, some of today’s most effective pro-Jewish and pro-Israel voices are individuals who once harboured odious views themselves. But there is a difference between being offered a way back into society and immediately being entrusted with representing the public. That distinction is where I believe Kemi Badenoch and the Conservative Party got this badly wrong.
Badenoch defended the decision to allow Bonehill-Paine to stand as a Conservative candidate for Somerset Council, arguing that he had served his sentence and had subsequently worked on counter-extremism. Bonehill-Paine later withdrew his candidacy amid the backlash and has instead been offered an advisory role with the Conservative Party on fighting extremism.
The notion of rehabilitation is a worthy one. But the first steps of someone's redemption should not necessarily be taken in the full glare of public office, especially when the person seeking that redemption targeted a prominent Jewish woman with precisely the kind of hatred that Jewish communities are still confronting today.
Rehabilitation should begin with rebuilding trust. It certainly does not begin with expecting the victim or the community that was targeted to watch the perpetrator receive a public platform.
But there is another absolute truth that should not be lost in this controversy. It would be a colossal mistake to allow this episode to erase the fact that Kemi Badenoch has, for several years now, been one of the strongest political allies of Britain's Jewish community.
Following a meeting with British Jewish community leaders in January 2025, representatives from the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust issued a joint statement thanking Kemi “for her allyship to the Jewish community and to Israel over many years.”
Even though I now live and work in New York, it has been impossible not to notice from across the Atlantic how unusually direct and supportive Kemi has been towards the British Jewish community at a time of alarming antisemitism.
After the Golders Green stabbing in April, when two Jewish men were attacked, Badenoch described what was happening to British Jews as an "epidemic of violence" and called it a "national emergency".
And in an open letter published in this very newspaper on the eve of Passover, she wrote: "We have allowed the poison of antisemitism to spread for too long."
Badenoch has stood out as one of the most prominent political allies of British Jews at a moment when antisemitism has become an increasingly poisonous feature of public life. That has earned her genuine goodwill within the Jewish community, but it has also made her a particularly tempting target for political opponents who would like nothing more than to portray her entire record through the prism of this one misjudgement.
Some will be salivating at this latest mishap. We should resist that temptation.
This was a misjudgment that hurt many in the Jewish community, but it arose from a moral position: the belief that people who genuinely repent and change should be given a second chance. The principle is right, but a second chance does not necessarily mean a place in public office, particularly where doing so risks reopening the wounds of those who were hurt by the original conduct.
Kemi Badenoch should be big enough to acknowledge that she got this one wrong. But neither should we allow one bad call to obscure the considerable goodwill she has rightly earned by repeatedly standing up for British Jews, often when doing so has been neither fashionable nor necessarily politically expedient. She has done so because she believes it is the right thing to do and because she is a genuine friend of the community. One misjudgment does not undo that record.
Jonathan Harounoff is an award-winning author, British journalist covering the Middle East, and Israel’s former international spokesperson at the United Nations
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.