Joshua Bonehill-Paine: Rehabilitation and Reward

From The Spectator, back in December: You’ve probably seen the videos. Kemi Badenoch delivering her Budget response in the form of a rap to a sobbing Rachel Reeves. Keir Starmer as a McDonald’s drive-thru worker. David Lammy as a Spice Girl in a tight dress. Reeves (again) as the Grand High Witch from The Witches. Behind the videos is one man. He runs the Crewkerne Gazette, an online publisher of viral political videos made with artificial intelligence. The ‘Crewkerne Man’ would not give me his name when we met for lunch in Somerset last week… He wishes to remain anonymous. We found out why that anonymity was so important two months later, when Channel 4 News revealed him to be none other than Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a one-time neo-Nazi with a string of convictions, including “malicious communications over an anti-Islam hoax that led to death threats against the owners of a Leicester pub”; “inciting racial hatred for promoting an antisemitic demonstration in Golders Green”; and…