The Conservative party is under pressure to investigate a string of remarks about a Jewish MP by its members, including a prospective councillor who tweeted: “Keep the Aryan race going”.
Sharon Thomason, who was selected last week as a Tory candidate for Warrington borough council, made the “repugnant” comment to the Labour MP Charlotte Nichols in February last year.
The Conservative party said on Monday that Thomason would no longer be standing for election and that it took action “swiftly and immediately” after being made aware of her comments.
However, the Guardian has seen a string of further inflammatory messages sent by Thomason and Wendy Maisey, the chair of the Warrington Conservatives, including comments accusing Nichols of using her religion and her sexuality to win votes.
Nichols, the MP for Warrington North, has said she converted to Reform Judaism in 2014 and she identifies as LGBT.
In one message to the Conservatives’ Warrington North campaign group on WhatsApp, Thomason wrote that Nichols “lives a lie and tells lies too” and added in March 2020: “She’s very odd. I still think she’s got some chromosomal issue. Her eyes are just too far apart.”
Maisey, a former Conservative party candidate who last week took part in a meeting with the party’s national chair, Amanda Milling, posted in the WhatsApp group that Nichols’ religion was “all a con and actually … very racist on her part”.
In other messages, she wrote that Nichols “turned her back on Catholicism but will jump on anything for a vote” and suggested the MP would fake a disability to win votes: “Next thing will be she’s in the vulnerable category. We always said she’ll pull out a disability at an appropriate time to go with Jewish ginger lgbt.”
In one exchange, Thomason asked “since when has Judaism been a race?” and said she was “dying to know what [Nichols] ‘came out’ as?” Maisey replied: “A pillock. She’s got it well sussed … you can be anti Semite & anti lgbt as long as the caveat is you identify as one after you’re questioned about it.”
The WhatsApp remarks, which were sent between June 2019 and July last year, will prove embarrassing for the Conservatives three months before elections across England, Wales and Scotland.
Angela Rayner, the deputy leader of the Labour party, called on the Conservative party to launch an investigation into its Warrington branch and explain when the party first knew about Thomason’s “Keep the Aryan race going” tweet.
Rayner said: “The promotion and propagation of a core tenet of racist Nazi ideology is completely unacceptable and has no place in our politics. I am horrified that someone who has publicly promoted these views was subsequently selected as a Conservative party candidate.
“I am particularly horrified that this statement was addressed to a Jewish member of parliament, making this antisemitic abuse especially vile and repugnant.”
In a letter to Milling, Rayner added: “As chair of the Conservative party I urge you to act and conduct a thorough investigation into Warrington Conservatives, how a Conservative party member who promoted Nazi ideology was subsequently selected as a Conservative party candidate, and whether Warrington Conservatives has a broader problem with racism and discrimination.”
It is not the first time Thomason and Maisey have come under fire for controversial comments.
Maisey, who was awarded an OBE in the 2020 New Year’s honours list, had to apologise in December 2019 for sharing a tweet claiming that a picture of a sick four-year-old boy on a hospital floor was fake and that his mother “must be a member of the Commie Corbyn cult”. The issue became a key moment in the 2019 general election campaign when Boris Johnson refused repeatedly to look at a picture of the boy.
In another Twitter post last June, Thomason proposed building a statue of Enoch Powell, the late Conservative MP whose infamous “rivers of blood” speech provoked racial division in 1968.
A Warrington Conservatives official said the party was not aware of Thomason’s previous remarks until after her selection last week.
She said that Maisey was only made aware of the tweet last week despite being sent a screen grab on Twitter by Nichols last March.
The official said it was “not fair to suggest everybody reads everything” and said Thomason “probably wasn’t” a Conservative party member when she posted it.
Thomason was an active member of a Conservative party campaign group to elect Maisey in Warrington North at the 2019 general election.
Thomason defended her messages and refused to apologise when contacted by the Guardian but refused to comment publicly, saying: “I have no comment to make for your readers.”
Maisey said: “I have not commented in relation to Ms Thomason’s tweet.
“I was only made aware of her tweet last week – she tweets under a different name, and any reference that I knew and condoned her tweet is wrong.
“I apologise if I have caused any offence with my comments in a WhatsApp group.”