Kemi Badenoch described Reform UK as “woke”, as a furious war of words broke out between the Tories and Nigel Farage’s party. Mr Farage accused Mrs Badenoch of “weakness and bad judgment”, after the Conservative leader failed to cut ties with former neo-Nazi activist Joshua Bonehill-Paine. He insisted: “If I’d been confronted with a candidate like that, he’d have been axed in 30 seconds.”
And he said: “She’s shown her judgment is not sound. She’s shown she’s prepared to fight for causes that are hopeless and then in the end have to u-turn.” But the Conservative leader mocked Mr Farage for claiming to be the target of an establishment plot, claiming he had a “victim mentality” similar to left-wing activists.
She said: “Reform are a woke party, and I know a lot of people don’t understand, the word woke is used to mean many things, a lot of people assume it’s a left-wing thing.
“But when I talk about woke, I talk about people who, it’s all grievance, it’s victim narratives, people are doing this to us, oppressor narratives, this is the oppressor class.
“On the left it’s whites are the oppressors or men are the oppressors, on the right it’s the establishment are the oppressors, look at what they’re doing to us.
“It’s all moaning and whingeing and not proper solutions. It’s about power dynamics and how to get power, not actually solutions and how to fix things.”
It followed Mr Farage’s decision to resign his House of Commons seat and force a by-election in his Clacton constituency, after he was criticised for accepting a £5 million gift from British cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborn.
A Reform source said: “According to Kemi, being woke apparently means not having neo-Nazis in your party.”
Mrs Badenoch faces criticism over her refusal to disown Mr Bonehill-Paine, who was convicted of racially harassing a Jewish former MP in 2016 while already serving a separate jail sentence for sharing antisemitic posts.
She initially defended the decision to select him as a Conservative council candidate, saying he had been rehabilitated and her party “believes in second chances”. He has now withdrawn from next year’s local elections, but Mrs Badenoch gave him a new role as an adviser to her party’s culture and integration commission.
Mr Farage said every party had candidates who “slip through the net” because they failed to reveal full details about their past. He said: “It’s what you do when you find out that their behaviour has been genuinely heinous, and this is one of the worst cases I’ve ever seen.
“The question then, as leader, is what do you do? I’ve had some of these. Now, if someone’s just said something stupid after a glass of wine, you kind of think, alright, you know what, the guy’s a retired police officer, impeccable record, said something stupid, we can forgive him.
“This is entirely different. This guy went to prison. And the hounding of a Labour member of Parliament, I mean, this is not funny.
“When I see a really bad case of repeated bad behaviour, I immediately disavow them and say they’re not standing officially for us as a party.”
But Mrs Badenoch had failed to take the action needed, he said.
The Reform leader also questioned whether there was a financial arrangement between the Conservatives and Bonehill-Paine, who produced satirical political videos on his Crewkerne Gazette social media channel which were often supportive of Mrs Badenoch.
He said: “So I don’t know what the relationship between this guy and the Conservative Party is. But I’m beginning to ask myself some questions about it.
“Was he employed by the Conservative Party? Is he still employed? I don’t know. I’m not casting any accusations, but there’s something we don’t know.”
Labour peer Baroness Luciana Berger, the ex-MP victimised by Mr Bonehill-Paine, described the Conservative Party’s decision to give him an advisory role as an “insult”.
