A Conservative activist who sent messages claiming to have paid “crackheads” £100 to beat up the Labour MP Yvette Cooper and warned that “if you make peaceful revolution difficult you make a violent one inevitable” has been jailed for nine weeks.

Joshua Spencer, who received a character reference from the Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyns, attended Cooper’s general election count in December as a representative of the Conservative party despite being under investigation by West Yorkshire police after his arrest.

The unemployed 25-year-old, a constituent of Cooper’s, was arrested in April last year and stood for the Conservatives in May’s local elections.

Spencer pleaded guilty in January to sending malicious messages about Cooper, a former work and pensions secretary who has been MP for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford since 1997.

On Friday he was sentenced to nine weeks in prison and given a restraining order preventing him from contacting Cooper or her former office manager, Jade Boterill, for 10 years.

The Tories said “we extend our sympathies” to Cooper and said Spencer has now been expelled from the party.

In a message sent last April to a man he met on a dating website, Spencer suggested Cooper should “pay” for trying to thwart a no-deal Brexit, after MPs voted to stop the UK leaving the EU on 29 March 2019 as planned. Read more

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