A Conservative candidate standing in city council elections in Nottingham has reportedly compared the millions of Remainers who have signed the petition to revoke Article 50 to those who voted for the Nazi party.

Carl Husted has deleted the Facebook post made about anti-Brexit campaigners, along with a series of other recent comments on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Yet the remarks, which Mr Husted called “jokes”, were screengrabbed and published by The Nottingham Post.

“The petition to revoke Article 50 now has the same number of signatures as the number of people who voted for Hitler’s Nazi party in 1930 Germany,” he wrote on 3 April. “Although Hitler didn’t have the benefit of petition signing bots and signatures from North Korea, Syria, Russia etc. So not quite as popular as 1930s nazism but edging closer. #godwinslaw.”

Mr Husted has since been suspended by the Conservative Party over the remarks.

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In another post he said Jeremy Corbyn was “repositioning Labour as the party of honest to goodness, hard-working jihadis”.

Referring to recently-revealed video footage in which Army soldiers appeared to be using an image of Mr Corbyn as target practice, he wrote: “People who genuinely celebrated the actual death of a three time democratically elected prime minister getting all pissy because soldiers PRETENDED to shoot a one time (so far, more to come) losing party leader who presents an existential threat to them. #allaboardtheironytrain.”

Mr Husted, who is running for the Tories in the Wollaton West ward at the 2 May vote, said he believed he was making the remarks privately, even though they were posted on his public profile.

Led By Donkeys beam anti-Brexit projection on the cliffs of Dover

He also claimed his post about people signing the anti-Brexit petition was a satirical comment on Godwin’s law – the online adage which states that the longer a subject is discussed online, the higher the probability of someone mentioning the Nazis.

“It’s a Godwin’s law joke, it’s nothing to do with politics, it’s a joke about how every thread eventually gets to that point,” he told the Nottingham newspaper.

“If it’s gone over somebody’s head, and they haven’t understood, I’d be happy to explain to that person and to send them a link explaining Godwin’s law.”

Condemning the remarks, the Labour MP for Nottingham South Lilian Greenwood said Mr Husted “isn’t fit to represent anyone, least of all in our city that welcomes and values its EU citizens and close links to Europe”.

In 2014, during a campaign to become a Conservative councillor in Wolverhampton, Mr Husted was forced to defend a Facebook post saying the city had a “disproportionate number of scum” as “evidently a joke”.