Crewkerne cornered
Viral content , Issue 1669 "'BANKSY of politics' goes back to the future with deepfake lampoons," chortled the Times on 6 February, lauding the man behind website the Crewkerne Gazette, which publishes AI-generated satirical videos of politicians.

"An anonymous 36-year-old from Somerset, [he] said that although his personal politics oscillated between the Conservatives and Reform and he received a Christmas card from [Kemi] Badenoch, no party was off limits."

The article was merely the latest in a slew of adulatory coverage for the website. The Sun has run several of its "side-splitting" videos, including one about Angela Rayner which it splashed on its front page last September. In November the Telegraph's William Sitwell enthused "Three cheers for the Kemi video that shows that satire isn't dead", calling it "a ray of joy".

The Spectator even took its creator out for lunch in December, unfazed by the fact he wouldn't reveal his true identity. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage praised the "hilarious" videos on GB News, and last November Sky News conducted an incognito interview with their creator, who appeared disguised in sunglasses and a baseball cap.

The mask slips
Which makes it rather awkward that he is actually Joshua Bonehill-Paine, who has multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred, sending malicious communications and racially aggravated harassment to his name.

In 2016 he was imprisoned for two years – to run concurrently with a 40-month prison sentence he was already serving – for what a judge described as "a cruel campaign of vile racist abuse" against Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish.

Mr Justice Spencer told him that "at the age of only 24 you have amassed a formidable record of offences of hate crime using the internet" and restricted his online access for five years, under threat of a further prison sentence.

Bonehill-Paine had posted large amounts of antisemitic material online ahead of a planned neo-Nazi rally in London, created online hoaxes regarding Asian grooming gangs and a pub banning on military personnel which led to its staff receiving death threats, and falsely named people as paedophiles online.

His defence in court over the threats to Berger was that he was "legitimately exercising his right to free speech".

In denial
Approached by the Eye in late December, Bonehill-Paine gave us a flat denial: "I can categorically deny that I am the individual which you have named."

We continued to gather evidence – and on 10 February he released a bizarre confessional video on the Crewkerne Gazette website and media channels in which he finally admitted his true identity and claimed it would "help fight against antisemitism in the UK".

The lengthy video features a gushing AI-generated interviewer questioning Bonehill-Paine on how after leaving prison he became "a leading counter-extremist advocate and adviser", and him replying that after he completed a Home Office counter-radicalisation programme he "regretted the mistakes I had made in the past" and former "awful ideology".

Bonehill-Paine also takes the opportunity to tell his non-existent interrogator: "I never have misled people."