“Tommy Robinson doesn’t exist as anyone knows him, as his new supporters know him. The person that he was was created by us. He’s a myth, he’s a legend, the real core of his beliefs are the EDL, he’s a mess.”
As America welcomed Donald Trump into the White House and Britain reeled from the masochism of the Brexit Referendum, Caolan Robertson sat fascinated in his flat in London’s Chelsea, transfixed by the political and cultural shifts happening in the West.
The next three years would see him take a dark plunge into the murky waters of radicalisation and the far-right’s hate, culminating in the creation of a manufactured figurehead for the cause in the form of ‘Tommy Robinson’ 2.0: a respectable freedom fighter, secretly loved by conservatives at home and abroad.
Their first meeting, however, had an innocence about it, Robertson tells Byline Times.
In early 2017, Tommy Robinson – whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon –turned up at the then 23-year-old’s door for an interview for his new online newspaper The New Brit. Into PR and marketing and interested in alt-right ideas and the culture war, Robertson says he was struck by how “humble” and “really sweet” Robinson seemed to be.
A strange alliance was forged between the young, gay Chelsea campaigner and the right-wing Luton street protestor.
At that point, Robertson lived a vastly different life from the English Defence League founder, who was primarily known as a kind of street protestor – a far cry from the internationally known figure on the far-right which Robertson says he helped create.
Robertson says he was “super nervous” at that first meeting with Robinson because he was a liberal gay man living in a well-to-do part of the capital, but that the then 34-year-old was not the thug he expected to meet. Standing on the doorstep that day, Robinson was waving a receipt for his train fare and Robertson promised to reimburse him for the cost and to take him for fish and chips afterwards.
“He was really lovely, he was very nervous and he had an envelope with his train receipt in it which was about £22 from Luton and he was like ‘I hope you don’t mind, but can I get a reimbursement for this?,” he says.
Robertson says he was “blown away” by the interview and “loved” Robinson, believing that the people should hear what he had to say. His campaigning instincts were also aroused by the mismatch between his expectations and the shy, amiable character he’d met: “I thought: he’s lied about by the media,” Robertson says.
He was drawn to Robinson by this “overwhelming sense of injustice” and found their meeting “exciting culturally” because their worlds were so different. They also shared a sense of thriving in chaos, Robertson says.
And so a strange alliance was forged between the young, gay Chelsea campaigner and the right-wing Luton street protestor – an alliance that would last for the next two years.
From that day on, Caolan Robertson’s mission was to make ‘Tommy Robinson’ a “palpable household name in Britain with the middle class and with students – not just the working class”. Robertson’s success was as unexpected as it was profound, and helped radicalise a whole new generation.
But,he says it was a two-way radicalisation. Robertson admits he “seemed to start falling into the same belief systems” that Robinson had “in terms of talking about what he was doing for women’s rights because Muslims hate women and gay rights because Muslims hate gay men and our liberal values in our country are going to be destroyed by Islam”.
As Robertson’s inner life became more troubled and deformed, the respectable right-wing makeover of Tommy Robinson had begun.
From Luton to Chelsea
Two years ago when he met ‘Tommy Robinson’, Caolan Robertson says he did not feel that the far-right activist had a far-reaching and diverse online presence that was being monetised.
Apart from some work filming videos for the Canadian far-right media organisation Rebel Media, Robertson says that Robinson was “aimless” and had no real conviction about anything. Robertson stepped into his vacancy.
“All [Tommy] would do was turn up, read the script and leave,” as Robertson puts it.
First on his list was to drop Robinson’s rhetoric on Islam and adopt a messaging focusing on “freedom”. Robertson wrote his scripts and filmed Robinson speaking in front of “the same backdrops as the mainstream media does”. He wanted to wash off the grime of the council estate and dress Robinson in middle-class cul-de-sac chic. They filmed his videos against the backdrop of Chelsea and the Thames.
“I said why don’t we drop the Islam thing? Don’t even talk about Islam. We’re here for freedom. Freedom for diversity of thought, freedom for diversity of opinion, freedom for gay rights, freedom for women… It was a mask for the far-right I guess.”
Caolan Robertson
“Whenever he was talking about Islam, he was talking about the history of Islam rather than Muslims,” says Robertson.
Then later, “I said why don’t we drop the Islam thing? Don’t even talk about Islam. We’re here for freedom. Freedom for diversity of thought, freedom for diversity of opinion, freedom for gay rights, freedom for women, freedom for everyone to do whatever you want away from the Government… A free society. It was a mask for the far-right I guess.”
Robertson admits he became obsessed with Robinson and that he was serving his own ends.
“We started to rebrand him as cool and alternative and edgy and started to do cool trailers which were highly stylised and cinematic,” he says. “Taking it away from politics and into culture. I wanted to take him away from being a political figure, arguing with the left and the right, and take him into mainstream culture because most people don’t really care about politics.”
The makeover worked, he says.
“We were getting stopped in queues at airports from super lovely families from the Cotswolds saying ‘oh my son has showed me your videos about free speech’, Robertson says. On another occasion, a glamorous British couple at an airport shook Robinson’s hands. “We obviously can’t say this back home but we think you’re fantastic,” they told him.
Hate Pays
But, while Robinson was becoming a guilty pleasure of middle-class conservatives, the methods Robertson was using to create the Tommy he wanted were taking a sinister turn.
Through their work for Rebel Media, the pair realised that Robinson’s old brand of aggression and confrontation was still a big sell and, from this, Robertson devised a YouTube series called Trollwatch in which Tommy Robinson and his two-man video crew would turn up at the homes or offices of critics and journalists unexpectedly – the addresses for some of these visits having been sourced by Robinson’s police contacts, according to Robertson.
The early spats between Robinson and his chosen targets generated more clicks and likes on Google’s video platform, with Robertson stating that YouTube incentivised such behaviour as 80% of their traffic came from YouTube recommendations.
“We were rewarded in views, popularity and money every single time YouTube recommended these videos,” Robertson says. “It encouraged us to look at Trollwatch, to look at more on-the-ground confrontations and encouraged us to take it away from an ideological, ‘let’s talk about this’ stance to a more physical thing. We would write scripts that were quite hardcore, ‘rise up, take things into your own hands, get really serious’.”
As an independent YouTube outlet, Tommy Robinson Online, the biggest hit video showed Robinson fighting with a