The Guardian view on the Conservatives under Kemi Badenoch: purging moderation is not 'common sense' | Editorial

A row over a local council candidate reveals a deeper problem with the Tory leader’s diagnosis of her party’s electoral predicament Kemi Badenoch has been clear about the qualifying criteria for prospective Conservative MPs. They must be “serious people who understand common sense,” she has said. The situation in local government is different, as demonstrated by Mrs Badenoch’s ill-judged support for a former neo-Nazi, selected to stand as a councillor in Somerset next year. Joshua Bonehill-Paine has convictions for racially aggravated harassment of a Jewish Labour MP and assaulting a police officer among other offences. On Wednesday, as pressure grew on the party leader to repudiate him, he withdrew his candidacy. Mrs Badenoch had defended Mr Bonehill-Paine on the grounds that he had renounced his former views and was involved in anti-extremism training, using his own experience of fanatical antisemitism as a cautionary tale. The Conservative leader said she believed in giving people a second chance. That is not an ethos she has always applied. When Louise Haigh, currently first secretary of state, resigned from Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet over an old and minor fraud of