14:21

The Scottish National party is reinstating an election candidate, Neale Hanvey, who was suspended for antisemitism before polling day, after he agreed to undergo training on antisemitism.

Hanvey was dumped as the SNP’s candidate for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath 14 days before December’s snap election after he admitted circulating two antisemitic posts, including one from the Kremlin-sponsored outlet Sputnik.

The Sputnik article about the Hungarian financier George Soros was illustrated with a cartoon of him holding puppets of German chancellor Angela Merkel and then US president Barack Obama. The second post was on Israeli policies with Palestine. He offered an “absolutely unequivocal” apology once they came to light.

Despite the controversy and the loss of the SNP’s campaigning resources, Hanvey refused to stand down as a candidate and won the seat by 1,243 votes, toppling the incumbent Labour MP Leslie Laird, then Labour’s shadow Scottish secretary. The seat, and a previous constituency it was partly created from, had been held by Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, for 22 years until 2005.

Hanvey has technically been sitting in the Commons as an independent but was being reintegrated by the SNP group at Westminster before the party’s disciplinary committee had reached a decision. He has been told his suspension will end in May, six months after he was first dropped as the party’s candidate, after he agreed to do an education course with the Antisemitism Policy Trust.

Glenn Campbell (@GlennBBC) “I am tortured by it”



MP Neale Hanvey ⁦@JNHanvey⁩ tells of his “internal moral panic” after suspension from SNP for sharing anti-semitic material



Mr Hanvey says he’s on an education programme with ⁦@antisempolicy⁩ “earnestly trying to make amends” pic.twitter.com/TySmWCkGeg

He told BBC Scotland he had been “tortured” by the accusations of antisemitism:

I never intended to cause offence and it was a deeply upsetting experience for me. I can describe it as a moral panic, an internal moral panic. ‘How can this be me?’ Do you know what I mean, because it didn’t reflect my values and I think the only thing that has kept me going is that I absolutely know – in a way that nobody else can understand – that I don’t have antisemitic views at all.

Asked whether his thinking had changed now he had studied this issue more deeply, Hanvey replied: