The Kemi Badenoch bandwagon crashed into political reality last week. For several months, Conservative cheerleaders have pushed a narrative that their heroine is a strategic genius who will salvage their party after its near-death experience at the last general election. Buoyed by a bump in her personal ratings, they brushed aside a string of awful election results, culminating in fifth place in the recent Manchester mayoral battle when they were beaten even by the bigots of Restore. But then came her strident defence of a Tory council candidate who was a convicted neo-Nazi – only for him to quit amid a storm of outrage led by a victim of his anti-Semitic brutality.

Critics pointed out Badenoch, shifting the Tories hard right, embraced a convicted racist but stopped former party chairman Sir Grant Shapps from standing, kicked out a former Downing Street chief of staff for criticising her leadership and purged candidates who support their own former policies on net zero. She did not help her cause with a hopeless radio interview, insulting every councillor in the land by claiming they just “look at parking and sorting out bins” and then saying she was “sceptical” about rehabilitation. But the Tory leader is, typically, continuing to fight – so authored an intriguing article in headlined “We must believe offenders can be rehabilitated” in defence of her stance.

She is walking a difficult tightrope. Badenoch is supporting a man imprisoned for appalling crimes on the basis that he is a reformed character while still attacking the Government’s prison release scheme – which, lest we forget, is another legacy of the grotesque mess left by her side after 14 years in power. The rehabilitation that she really seeks, of course, is for her own party after its criminal incompetence in office. Never forget she was a minister under Boris Johnson and joined the cabinet of Liz Truss. But since I agree strongly with the article’s core sentiment – that we should foster and welcome rehabilitation of offenders in our society – let us take her words at face value.

The crimes of Joshua Bonehill-Paine were repugnant. He served prison sentences for race hate, was convicted of assaulting a police officer, stirred up anti-Semitic and misogynist attacks against a Jewish MP, founded a far-right party and showed so little contrition that he gave a Nazi salute in court. So this former fascist jailbird was a strange choice to represent the Tory party, even in its current guise. But Badenoch argues he has served his sentence, rejected vile beliefs held in the past and now works to curb the sort of extremism he once espoused. She argues – rightly – that we need “fewer double standards” over a justice system “repeatedly failing to protect the public” and condemns hypocrisy when politicians succumb to tribalism.

Unfortunately, Badenoch is guilty of gross hypocrisy in her new pose as an apostle of rehabilitation. “The country needs conviction politicians, not politicians with convictions,” she said when Louise Haigh resigned from the cabinet over a decade-old fraud offence. She demanded Shamima Begum – 15 years old when she left her school in east London to join Islamic State in Syria – never be allowed back into Britain, taking a more hardline position than Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. And she seeks deportation of virtually all foreign criminals, regardless of the gravity of their offences or any family ties in Britain.

Now she has the nerve to write about contradictions being so hard to ignore when attacking rivals for complaining about her selection of Bonehill-Paine (who churns out AI-created “humorous” videos in support of the Tories and has been rewarded with a national party advisory role despite the furore). And then there is the glaring flaw in her core position: saying that she is “extremely sceptical about the ability of prison to rehabilitate” and yet still calling for a more forceful approach to crime with more punitive sentencing, more prisons and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights on the grounds it will “make sentences tougher“.

As she pointed out while serving on the justice committee earlier in her career, recidivism costs this country billions of pounds each year. So if Britain jails more people than anywhere else in western Europe – twice as many as some neighbours that have significantly lower reoffending rates – and our prisons fail to rehabilitate offenders, surely this should lead someone to question the benefits of simply locking up more people? Badenoch wrote that “most people leave prison without having changed at all”. And like it or not, these offenders come back to live in our communities after time spent in overcrowded cells in prisons often rife with drugs and lacking the resources to tackle many underlying issues leading to crime.

It would be good to think Badenoch is confronting past misdeeds by her party and taking a new path, similar to the claims she makes for Bonehill-Paine. It was, after all, some of the most hardline Republicans in the United States who woke up to this spiral of stupidity – blowing more cash to build more prisons to lock up more citizens rather than trying to curb addictions, soothe mental health conditions, fight illiteracy or find homes to cut recidivism. The cause of prison reform and rehabilitation united libertarians wanting to scale back the state, fiscal conservatives seeking to slash spending and the religious right believing in redemption. And whatever populist politicians might say, it is far tougher to force people to change errant behaviour and confront personal demons rather than simply stuffing them behind bars.

Badenoch is correct to say politicians should be tough enough to stand against the tide and wise enough to recognise the merits of rehabilitation. “That is harder politics than joining a pile-on,” she wrote. But has she really bought into this concept of rehabilitation with a Damascene conversion, even disavowing the idea that victims can dictate criminal justice policy – or is this just another depressing example of the hypocrisy and double standards that she admits so dismays the public?