The office of a Conservative parliamentary candidate was vandalised with abusive graffiti calling him a “Zionist child killer’.

The offensive words were painted in red paint in the early hours of Monday morning on the office windows of Robert Largan, who is re-standing for the Derbyshire constituency of High Peak.

He told the JC the graffiti was discovered by his office staff. “This is not the first time I’ve had my office graffitied and not the first time someone called me Zionist or child killer,” he said.

He said his reaction was a sinking feeling of “here we go again” and was worried that this sort of abusive behaviour was becoming “routine”.

Largan expressed concern over online conspiracies that were posted following the incident – “all sorts of comments on a Facebook group suggesting I carried it out myself” and it was a “false flag”. One comment even compared the incident to the Reichstag fire of 1933, carried out by the Nazis and blamed on the communists.

The Tory candidate said his biggest worry was over the safety and wellbeing of his staff who “didn’t ask for any of this, and this is what they have to face” while carrying out their job.

Despite this, he was keen to stress that “the response from local people has been amazing”, and some people volunteered to help clean up the vandalism. He added that “while this is depressing, it is important to remind ourselves that the vast majority of people object to this sort of behaviour.”

Largan was first elected to Parliament in 2019, winning the seat from Labour’s Ruth George.

During the 2019 election campaign, Largan said he had been subject to antisemitic abuse on the doorstep, with a voter saying he would not be voting for him because “I don’t trust anything to do with the Jews.”

He attacked the local Labour Party at the time for their apparent tolerance of antisemitism, saying: “I’m not Jewish though I grew up in north Manchester and care passionately about fighting anti-Jewish racism, which has led some High Peak Labour activists to assume I am, which might explain such comments and why a former Labour councillor keeps changing my name to Lagermann and Larganberg.”