Conservative council leader suspended after tweeting post describing Tommy Robinson as a 'patriot'

Andrew Bowles has so far refused to remove the post from his Twitter page arguing he is ‘supporting the process of free speech’

A Conservative council leader has been suspended after he retweeted an image describing Tommy Robinson as a “patriot”.

Swale Borough Council leader Andrew Bowles shared a post on Twitter protesting about Robinson’s ban from Facebook and Instagram.

The news of Mr Bowles’s suspension was first reported on Channel 4 News on 5 March but the councillor claimed that he had not “heard from the party”.

CCHQ has now confirmed the news but has not provided details of when the suspension took place.

The tweet in question remains on Mr Bowles’s Twitter profile and he has claimed he was “supporting the process of free speech”.

“As an old fashioned liberal with a small ‘l’, I believe totally in free speech, censorship is a slippery path,” he told the Mirror.

“I believe any views, particularly the more obnoxious they are, need the oxygen of publicity so the public can judge them.

“I wasn’t supporting him, I was supporting the process of free speech.”

The confirmation of the news comes a day after 14 Conservative party members were suspended after posting Islamophobic or racist comments on social media.

Comments found on a pro-Jacob Rees-Mogg Facebook group from Conservative Party members included calling for Muslims to be “turfed out of public office”, for the government to “get rid of all mosques” and calling home secretary Sajid Javid a “Trojan horse”.

The former chair of the party, Baroness Warsi, said she had spent two years trying to convince the Conservatives to address the problem of Islamophobia internally.

“When institutions fail to respond proactively and hide behind bureaucracy and process and do not respond within a timely fashion to these matters then there is an institutional problem,” she said.