Kemi Badenoch says Joshua Bonehill-Paine will now advise the Conservatives on tackling extremism.

A former neo-Nazi selected by the Conservatives to fight a council election next year has pulled out after a backlash against his candidacy. Joshua Bonehill-Paine was convicted of racially harassing Jewish former Labour MP Luciana Berger in 2016, while already serving a separate jail sentence for sharing antisemitic posts. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had defended the decision to select him as a candidate for the new Somerset Council seat of Crewkerne South, saying he had been rehabilitated and her party "believes in second chances". But Bonehill-Paine said he had now withdrawn his candidacy, and had been offered a position as an anti-extremism adviser to the party. In a social media post, he said the position with the Conservative Party's Culture and Integration Commission would focus on advising on how to prevent young men from being radicalised. Bonehill-Paine spent three years in prison after he was jailed in 2015 for posting antisemitic material ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally. A year later in 2016, he was convicted of racially harassing then-Labour MP Berger, who now sits as Baroness Berger in the House of Lords. He has described his past views as "indefensible" and says he has spent years opposing antisemitism since leaving prison in 2018.