On Thursday justice finally caught up with Ian Millard, a prolific and rancid antisemite.

Millard was once a barrister but has been a persistent if fringe presence on the neo-nazi scene since the late 1970s. He once ran his own micro-party and was closely associated with Lucy Roberts (alias Ludmilla Baack), a leading officer in Britain’s most secretive nazi group, the League of St George.

At his rambling website, which is eccentric even by far-right standards, Millard insists he is not a Hitler worshipper, but somehow, time and again, each blog entry returns to the topic of Uncle Adolf and his evil Jewish foes.

One of Millard’s few appearances in the real world was as a speaker in 2017 at a meeting of Jeremy Bedford-Turner’s London Forum, held at a hotel near Gloucester Road tube station. Unfortunately for Millard and his well-heeled audience, anti-fascists laid siege to the hotel and the meeting ended early with little chance for socialising.

Until recently Millard was one of the few remaining members of the Alison Chabloz fan club, defending her against factional attacks from other quarters of the Hitler-worshipping, Holocaust-denying scene.

But recently he seems to have become a fan of two of Chabloz’s most hated rivals, Patriotic Alternative convict Sam Melia and his wife Laura Tyrie, alias Laura Towler.

Millard also claims to be a devotee of the esoteric writer and educational theorist Rudolf Steiner. It’s unfortunate for Steiner’s saner followers that their movement has several times been tainted by association with the likes of Millard and the former SS officer Werner Haverbeck (whose widow Ursula remains one of Europe’s most active Holocaust deniers).

In 2016, by which time he had long since ceased to be an active barrister, Millard was disbarred for professional misconduct. The Bar Council found he had repeatedly used his Twitter account to promote antisemitism.

More than seven years later, similar vile obsessions have led to Millard’s conviction on five charges of posting grossly offensive antisemitic material online.

Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Sophie Stephens said this week: “In fact, what he posted were grossly offensive and criminal claims about Jewish people. It is particularly shocking that a former barrister, who is meant to engage the law in the pursuit of justice, would express such flagrant hatred.”

Millard’s sentence was a nine-month community order. Searchlight hopes that this will be rigorously enforced and that Millard will not be allowed to scoff at justice in the way that Alison Chabloz repeatedly did.

Questions should also be asked of internet providers who have repeatedly facilitated Millard’s poisonous effusions.

Perhaps time is at last running out for those who believed that the internet could be used as a tool for unpoliced Jew-baiting and other hatemongering.

Now 67, Millard describes himself as “a voice crying in the wilderness”. That’s exactly where he belongs and where he has chosen to consign himself.