The Tommy Robinson outriders were early to Epping. Wendell Daniel, a former Labour councillor who is now a film-maker for Robinson’s Urban Scoop video platform, turned his microphone to a young woman on the edge of the protests in the Essex town.
“Look into that,” he said pointing to the camera. “Talk to Tommy, tell him you want to see him coming down here.”
“Tommy,” she responded, “I think you should definitely come down because you will help out the situation so much more.”
Robinson, 42, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was quick to respond: “Hear you loud & clear, I’m coming to Epping next Sunday ladies & bringing thousands more with me,” he said on X. The actor and rightwing activist Laurence Fox was coming along too, he added.
For days, Epping has been the scene of demonstrations outside the town’s Bell hotel after the charging of an Ethiopian asylum seeker – recently arrived on a small boat – with sexual assault against a local girl.
With the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, talking up the risk of the disorder spreading further, it had appeared the perfect opportunity for Robinson, with a so-called “migrant hotel” providing the focus.
Protesters march from the Bell hotel, where refugees are being housed, to Epping civic centre, where a council meeting was due to take place. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
Twenty-four hours later, Robinson appeared to have gone cold on the idea. It might not benefit him and it might not benefit Epping, he mused on camera.
It might appear an awkward volte-face, but Lucy Brown, once a right-hand woman to Robinson, chronicling his every stunt and provocative comment for social media for two years, had seen it all before.
It was, the 34-year-old suggested, an insight into both his frustrating tendency to act on instinct and a reliance on the colourful team behind him, an inner circle that includes the son of a Krays’ gangster, the Canadian publisher of a far-right platform and a Sikh convicted of being part of a robbery in which a shop worker was threatened with having his throat slashed.
“He’s very reactive,” Brown said of Robinson. “It’s often just what comes into his head. He’s very quick to believe his own myth. It takes probably a bunch of messages from people saying, ‘Don’t do it’. And finally he has to begrudgingly say: ‘Oh, maybe it’s not a good idea’.
“He’ll just rush in, straight away, whatever feels right at the time. He just does not think. Which is why he falls in [to] prison all the time, because he’s always saying stuff that he shouldn’t.”
Brown was with Robinson at some of the key moments early in his rise, including escorting him to what would be a highly lucrative first meeting with Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to Donald Trump. Bannon thought he was ex-army, a bemused Robinson disclosed to her at the time. Brown left Robinson’s side after a bruising falling out, but suspects that his enthusiasm for Epping dulled when he was alerted by his entourage to appeals from leading figures in the local protests for him to stay away.
Robinson may appear to be a one-man band, marshalling his significant following in the UK and a trans-national far-right community that is particularly strong in the US thanks to Bannon and Elon Musk. This week, Robinson sent out an email to followers to raise £106,000 to fund an upcoming demonstration, according to one recipient.
In truth, the 42-year-old sits at the centre of an ecosystem of long-term acolytes and more recent hangers-on, who are key to facilitating what even his harshest critics will admit is a successful campaign to put himself at the heart of national debate.
When Robinson judicially reviewed his “detention in solitary confinement and treatment” at HMP Woodhill, where he was jailed for repeating false claims about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee in defiance of a court injunction, the judge ruled against him on the grounds that it was for his protection and he had enjoyed “80 social visits, not including those from family members”.
On leaving prison, Robinson told a friendly podcaster that he had planned from his cell a ‘Uniting the Kingdom’ demonstration in London to be held on 13 September, all with the help of regular communication with his lieutenants.
Who then is Team Tommy? Brown, who at one point moved to Bedfordshire to work more closely with Robinson, stopped working with him seven years ago, but the core around him has remained remarkably stable for at least a decade, according to Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate.
On leaving HMP Woodhill, Robinson had words of thanks on the steps of the prison for Ezra Levant, the Canadian owner of Rebel Media, a social media platform similar to the better known Breitbart, for helping his family while he was in jail.
Tommy Robinson after his release from HMP Woodhill in May. His 18-month sentence for contempt of court was reduced by four months at the high court. Photograph: @TRobinsonNewEra/PA
Nine years ago, he had started paying Robinson £200 a video for Rebel. The platform generates revenue through donations from viewers and crowdfunding campaigns. Brown, who was the helping hand with the camera at the start of that relationship, said Robinson had become a big earner for the businessman.
“Ezra Levant is very important, definitely kind of like the show runner, and it’s fascinating seeing him still around,” she said. “He is the one that goes down to the court cases with [former Sun journalist] Dan Wootton and spins the story to make sure that everyone knows that Tommy’s actually the victim, guys. He is perpetuating the Tommy myth despite seeing him up close and personal. But it is a business to him.”
While it was with Levant that Robinson did his first interview after leaving jail, the second was on a podcast called The Dozen hosted by Liam Tuffs, son of Peter Gillett, a registered sex offender who was said by Reggie Kray to be his “adoptive son”.
Tuffs, who runs a security firm and has described his father as an “animal” and “narcissist”, has interviewed figures such as Laurence Fox (in a episode entitled “British Culture is under Attack”) but he has also featured Adam Kelwick, the imam at the Abdullah Quilliam mosque in Liverpool (an episode entitled “Death Cult or Peaceful Religion? Muslim Leader Quizzed over Radical Islam”).
“He’s a friend of Tommy that now and again would go on stage and compere for him,” said Brown of Tuffs, who is regarded as a calming influence on Robinson, who has been diagnosed with ADHD. “I’ve watched him sidle his way in. He likes to tell people that he helps Tommy get sober, but I’m not sure if we can trust that Tommy is sober, to be honest with you.”
It was Tufts and Guramit Singh, a former leading member of the English Defence League (EDL), who was with Robinson at the Hawksmoor restaurant on London’s Air Street last month when they were asked to leave because staff “felt uncomfortable serving him”.
Singh, from Nottingham, was sentenced in 2013 to seven years and three months in jail for his role in a robbery during which a shop assistant was pinned the ground and made threats to slash his throat if he did not hand over cash.
Tommy Robinson speaks to supporters and media as he leaves Westminster magistrates court in June. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images
There is a further tranche of Robinson devotees at Urban Scoop, the so-called “independent journalism” website to which Robinson is a consultant. It was set up by Adam Geary, better known as “Nem”, and one of Robinson’s closest advisers since the rough and ready days of the EDL.
You give Tom everything and he just wants more and more until you have nothing left to give. And then he doesn’t want to know you
Robinson today emphasises the peacefulness of the protests he organises and the relationship with the police that he has sought to build. But Brown said that those who crossed him were well aware of his ruthlessness.
In his biography, Tommy, the Hope Not Hate founder, Nick Lowles, reported how Robinson failed to visit his cousin, Kev Carroll, a former leader of the EDL, for six months when he was on remand after he was caught wielding a machete while standing on the bonnet of a car.
“I’m 52 years old and I’ve got nothing to show for it,” Carroll later wrote. “You give Tom everything and he just wants more and more until you have nothing left to give. And then he doesn’t want to know you.”
Lowles recalled how Robinson doorstepped him at his home alongside “self-confessed bomb-maker” Peter Keeley to accuse him of paying people to “make up information about him”. His behaviour towards a female reporter at the Independent, after she investigated his finances, compelled her to apply for an interim stalking order.
What, then, keeps people by Robinson’s side? “A lot of these guys around him seem to have the same kind of modus operandi of ‘protect the source’ – because I guess they’ll probably make money as well from association with him”, said Brown. “Many of them have their own little YouTube channels, with varying degrees of success.”
There was a darkness to her experience with Robinson, she said. She remembered “the dodgy guys that look and dress just like him” and the drink and drugs binges. Her memoirs, The Hate Club, are expected to chronicle some of the sleazier moments in her time with him when she self-publishes next month. Robinson has admitted to past heavy drug use while denying claims that he used donations to buy cocaine and pay for the services of sex workers.
But he has a charisma that lures people into his circle, said Brown, who is married to Sascha Bailey, the son of the photographer David Bailey.
“It’s like being around Peter Pan or something,” she said. “You just have to keep up the myth. You’re either in or out. He wines and dines them all, you know. ‘Come out. We’ll go for drinks’. He schmoozes people, and he knows what they want. That’s something I noticed when we were working together – he knows what people want to hear.”
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