It is 6.45pm on Friday evening in Belgravia. All around, young Londoners imbibe the Christmas spirit, plus anything else they can procure. Mischief is in the air. Then my phone pings. It’s a voice note from Tommy Robinson.
“Opposite the Houses of Parliament, the opposite side of the river. Be there in an hour.”
Robinson (43) is the UK’s most notorious anti-Muslim activist and the street leader of the radical right-wing nationalist upsurge gripping Britain. If Nigel Farage is UK nationalism’s pint of beer, Robinson is its whiskey: distilled to greater potency, harder to handle.
Anyone who can lead hundreds of thousands of radical right-wing protesters on to London’s streets, as he did in September, has tapped into something big. Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – is revered by his fans, deplored by his critics. But like it or not, he is a driving force in the race and identity-fuelled tremors roiling Britain.
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I spent weeks convincing him to let me observe him for a day. Tonight’s the night. I soon bid Belgravia’s revellers adieu and head towards Westminster. By 7.30pm, I am pacing the riverside walkway below St Thomas’s hospital.
The black waters of the Thames shimmer in the yellow lights of Big Ben, directly opposite, as well as the green lights from Westminster Bridge. The retaining wall behind the path is covered in love hearts – London’s Covid memorial wall.
It seems an incongruous spot to meet Robinson. Eventually I find him and his entourage on the walkway by the bridge. Soon his team get to work, clacking and banging and building a mini scaffold tower.
Robinson plans to project across the river on to the Houses of Parliament an announcement of the date for his next Unite the Kingdom rally in London – some time in late spring or early summer. But they must get their projector up before police arrive.
I have met Robinson before, at a hotel near his Bedfordshire home. Then, he was slightly cagey, suspicious, even provocative. He dislikes mainstream media. “Let’s see if you are one of the w***ers,” he said, annoyed that many journalists label him as far right.
[ I was not surprised to see the Irish Tricolour at the Tommy Robinson marchOpens in new window ]
But tonight on the Thames he is friendly enough. Giddy about the stunt, jocular with his team. There are about 25 of them between riggers, technical crew, right-wing YouTubers, videographers and a presenter from Urban Scoop, a media platform he is linked with.
The team includes about 10 security guards with earpieces, watching everything and everyone. Robinson, who was once part of a football hooligan “firm” in Luton, is hardly a dainty petal. But there are plenty in Britain who might hurt him if they got the chance.
I tell Robinson that Britain feels uneasy. It is upset with itself over migration, identity and the very meaning of Britishness. Where is the country going?
“Don’t ask me. If you ask the majority of the British public, they believe it is heading towards civil war,” he says. A YouGov poll last year did not find a majority who believe this, but still, 32 per cent of Britons believed a civil war was likely in the next decade.
“Does that not terrify you? When the majority of the public believe it is heading for civil war, at some point, some of that public will start preparing for civil war. That’s what people think. That’s not my view. That’s government research on their views.”
I tell him that sort of talk will only frighten some people. He gets more animated, trenchant.
“We are frightened. We’ve got 40,000 Muslims on the terror watch list.”
In 2020, MI5 said about 43,000 people were on the UK’s terror watch list. It does not break out their backgrounds or ideologies. The Daily Telegraph reported that the “vast majority” – or about 39,000 – were Islamists, versus a few thousand from the hard right.
“We’ve got boats full of God knows who coming in. We are frightened. A 15-year-old was taken into Leamington Spa woods and raped by two Afghans. We are frightened.”
Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, both Afghan nationals aged 17, pleaded guilty to that attack in October.
“Have you got daughters? I’ve got two,” says Robinson.
He alleges a tenfold increase in rapes in the UK from 2003 to 2023, correlating with Muslim immigration. Statistics show police-reported cases did rise more than fivefold in that time in England and Wales. Experts say much of the rise was due to more willingness to report. More than 85 per cent of women victims are attacked by men known to them.
Robinson goes through a raft of complaints about migrants, especially Muslims from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia. He wants immigration to Britain halted from Muslim-majority countries, aping a favoured policy of US president Donald Trump.
Many trends in Britain’s current right-wing nationalist upsurge ape Trump’s Maga movement – the growing links to UK evangelical Christian nationalists; support from tech oligarchs such as Elon Musk, who has paid for lawyers for Robinson.
Robinson says UK politicians “deny the will of the people”. Yet Britain had an election last year – a Labour landslide win. But Farage’s Reform UK is now way ahead in polls.
“We can do this democratically. We don’t want trouble,” Robinson says. “We’ve got so many friends in Northern Ireland who say ‘the last thing you want to go through is what we went through’. But that’s where politicians are taking us. They’re winding us up.”
As quickly as Robinson gets on his soapbox, he steps off it and his demeanour lightens again. The whole point of projecting on to parliament – illegal under planning laws – is to bring Unite The Kingdom’s campaign to “the people’s house”. But it isn’t going well.
They are more than an hour into the operation, and the tech guys can’t get the projector to focus on the parliamentary buildings across the river. They Google the equipment for clues. All the while, the loud thrum of the hired generator attracts unwanted attention while passersby stare at the hastily erected scaffold and lights.
A young woman walking the path recognises Robinson. She complains to me in harsh terms about his alleged attitudes towards people of different races. Yet I note his right-hand man at the river, his old English Defence League buddy Guramit Singh, is a Sikh. The Urban Scoop film-maker, Brother Wendell, is a black man. The next day, I will meet tens of Robinson’s allies who are of different colours and backgrounds. But no Muslims.
While the tech guys battle the equipment, I speak to a Korea-born, Scotland-raised anti-Muslim right-wing influencer, Ryan Williams, who is along for the ride. He is infamous for wearing strips of bacon on his shirt in a Sky News interview about Islam. His social media handle is Leavethegoatsalone.
Williams, also a talented cellist, says he met Robinson through Turning Point, the assassinated US activist Charlie Kirk’s organisation. Williams’s views on Islam seem even harsher than Robinson’s.
“I think the British people have had enough. British culture should be respected.”
The police finally arrive after an hour and 20 minutes. Giggles quietly ripple through Robinson’s team. The two officers look like twins, both aged in their 20s with identical moustaches. For Robinson’s crew, it looks like they’ve been sent from so-called “woke” central casting.
Robinson and Singh try to fob them off. The officers go off to check the law with their superiors. The team’s discreet laughter grows to guffaws.
“I’ve never seen moustaches like it. I thought it was a comedy act,” says Robinson, barely able to breathe.
“I thought it was f**king Hale and Pace,” roars one of his associates.
More senior officers return. Eventually, Robinson’s team gives up on the projection – they only managed to land a Union Jack on the building, not the slide with the rally date.
Robinson tells his crew to pack the gear, while he films a piece with Urban Scoop which includes a direct appeal by the interviewer to Musk to attend Unite The Kingdom’s next big protest.
Meanwhile, the day after the projection, on Saturday afternoon, Robinson and a bunch of evangelical Christian nationalists are organising a Christmas carol event in Whitehall. They say they’ll “put the Christ back into Christmas” because, they allege, Britain’s Christian cultural heritage has been eroded.
Robinson tells me he embraced God earlier this year while in prison for contempt. “For a long time I was searching for something, but I couldn’t find it.”
He says Saturday’s crowd will be small “but beautiful”. He insists the event is non-political. Before I leave for the night, he asks me to meet him, before the carols, at 10am near King’s Road in Chelsea, to join a planning meeting over breakfast with his team.
I am on the King’s Road by 9.30am, but Robinson isn’t answering messages. I check every cafe I can find in the area. No joy. It is the ghosting of Christmas present.
I retire to the Mona Lisa cafe in the working-class World’s End district of Chelsea. I look around at the locals wolfing bacon and beans, wondering how many support Robinson.
I get to Whitehall by noon. There is a very heavy police presence. The street is split into three, separated by impassable barriers. Robinson’s Unite The Kingdom Christmas carols event is in the middle section, sandwiched between a left-wing anti-racist counter-protest near parliament and a libertarian/right-wing anti-digital ID protest up nearer Trafalgar Square.
Media report the Unite The Kingdom carols crowd at 1,000, but I suspect it may have been double that. Many are clearly nationalists, draped in St George flags or Union Jacks. But some are clearly Christians of an evangelical or born again bent. One carries a huge wooden cross.
Some emit a fervour, such as the three women sitting on a wall outside the cabinet office, singing Christian rock songs with eyes closed for an hour. Others chant “Christ is king”. A few men call out for Robinson to the air of an old football chant.
Ian (81) is from Portsmouth. He was at the big UTK event last September. He says he has come to the carols events to defend Christian culture, even though he is an atheist himself. “I don’t believe in any of that stuff. But Christian values built Britain.”
Echoing Robinson from the previous night, he believes strife and conflict is coming to Britain. “And civil war is better than serfdom.” He is angry over Covid lockdowns.
There is a frisson as Robinson arrives at about 1.20pm. I spot an Urban Scoop presenter from the previous night, an influencer known as Lauren the Insider. She seeks out Robinson to ask if I can join his entourage backstage, a roped-off makeshift VIP area.
Suddenly I am in the midst of a private gathering of high-profile senior figures in Britain’s radical right-wing fraternity, including its English nationalist and Christian wings.
I see Robinson’s long-time political associate, Liam Tuffs. I spot another of his close friends, activist Danny Tommo. Nearby is Ceirion Dewar, a charismatic missionary bishop of the breakaway Confessing Anglican Church. Dewar gives fiery religious speeches at Robinson’s events – his speech at Unite The Kingdom in September went viral.
There is Fr Phil Harris, an Anglo-Catholic priest who fell out with church hierarchy over a controversial speech he gave about the Southport riots in 2024. I spot Danny Roscoe, a right-wing influencer. I also speak to Dean Rohail, a Pakistani convert to Christianity, now a chaplain who preaches Christian nationalism.
I also see “Young Bob”, one of the most popular radical nationalist YouTubers in Britain. The last time I saw him, he was being arrested at the Aston Villa versus Maccabi Tel Aviv football match in Birmingham. He says they released him after five hours.
Backstage, it is all beginning to feel like a 2020 US-style Maga-evangelical event.
Robinson just laughs when I ask where he was on King’s Road in the morning. But he elaborates about finding God. He was born and raised in Luton as a Catholic – his mother is from Dublin. But he drifted away from the church as a youngster.
Does he consider himself Catholic now?
“No. I feel betrayed by the Catholic church. I listened to the pope recently. Did you? He’s not my pope.”
On Saturday, England’s traditional Anglican churches criticise the growing closeness of Robinson’s nationalist events to evangelical Christianity. He retorts that the churches’ “weakness” is why Anglican churches are “empty” and “muscular Christianity” is coming instead.
Robinson insists he became religious in prison due to the influence of “a pastor” who spoke to him in his cell, where he had been in solitary confinement. “I realised that everything comes from the bible. And I’m a sinner. And Jesus was close to sinners.”
The religious figure who visited Robinson in his cell was Rikki Doolan, a Pentecostal pastor who has known Robinson since 2018. Wearing slicked-back hair and a long beard, Doolan, a self-confessed former “hopeless addict”, is also at the Whitehall event.
I ask him what happened with Robinson. He says they first started talking about politics in his cell, then switched to the gospel. “We spoke about the Christian heritage of this nation and I told him about salvation, what it means to be saved. I asked him if he wanted to do the prayer of salvation. He had no hesitation.”
I watch Robinson take part in a group prayer service before the Whitehall event kicks off. The running order includes traditional Christmas carols, evangelical gospel songs, fiery sermons from Dewar and others, and a speech to the crowd by Robinson. He says the event is “the most beautiful moment” he has ever experienced in his activism.
Afterwards, he is mobbed by autograph and selfie hunters. I watch one woman break down in tears as she thanks him “for everything you have done”.
In the evening, Robinson turns to me before he leaves.
“Well? What did you think of that? Did you think that was ‘far right’?”
I tell him that I think the event went well from his perspective.
His security team sweep him away from the enthusiastic fans trying to get a piece of him. One way or another, Robinson always needs to be saved.
