The football hooligan turned bigoted online rabble-rouser who should be too toxic for any political party

It rarely takes long for Tommy Robinson to be unmasked. Despite his best efforts to reinvent himself as a well-intentioned protector of the British way of life, he always ends up revealing his true nature as a bigoted and deeply malevolent outcast.

Nor do Rebuild Britain’s not-so-subtle proposals offer Robinson even a faint veneer of respectability.

In fact, they amount to little more than an admission by leader Rupert Lowe that he is prepared to accept all forms of political lake life into the party’s ranks.

None of this comes as a surprise, following revelations in The Mail on Sunday that Restore activists had joined neo-Nazis at a white supremacist summit in Portugal last month.

Robinson, who was detained under anti-terrorism laws at Heathrow airport after returning from a visit to Russia at the weekend, is accused of inciting riots in recent weeks following the stabbing attack in Belfast and the Henry Nowak murder trial.

But its history of violence, crime and far-right thuggery goes way back, in a dark and distant past.

Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), now 43, was born to an English father and a mother who moved here from Ireland.

His parents separated when he was a toddler, so he was brought up in Luton by his mother and her second husband. He left school at 16 after gaining grade 11 AC at GCSE and began training as an aeronautical engineer at Luton airport after seeing tough competition that saw 600 applications for just four apprenticeship positions.

But Robinson’s fledgling career collapsed in 2004 when he was jailed for 12 months on charges of causing actual bodily harm after punching and kicking an off-duty police officer.

He later retrained as a plumber and carpenter, specializing in renovating properties before eventually selling them. Other entries on his CV include information that he owns a tanning salon.

By the time Robinson was in his mid-twenties, he was briefly a member of the deeply racist British National Party.

In later interviews, he claimed that he was warned about immigrants from a young age and that his family members told him ‘Don’t look at Asians’. ‘Don’t make eye contact’… and I thought, ‘Why am I walking around looking at the ground?’

Talking about his school days, he insisted that the ‘division’ was clear even then. ‘They had playgrounds,’ he said.

‘We had ours. And it’s not just our school. These are every school in Luton. ‘There have always been problems.’

Robinson first came to national attention in 2009 with a small demonstration in his hometown.

Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Anglican Regiment, who were parading through the center of Luton after returning from duty in Afghanistan, were met with shouts of “terrorists” and “butchers of Basra” from a group of Islamist protesters. Robinson and other white football fans led a noisy counter-protest.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (photographed speaking to demonstrators at London’s Aldgate Station in September 2011) adopted the pseudonym Tommy Robinson from the promoter of Luton Town’s football hooligan firm in the early 1980s.

This was effectively the beginning of the neo-fascist English Defense League (EDL), which started as a local pressure group and eventually spread its tentacles to organize violent protests across Britain. In one of his first interviews, Robinson, then 26-year-old leader of the EDL, complained that city centers were ‘overrun by Islamist extremists’.

Around the same time, he adopted the pseudonym Tommy Robinson from the promoter of Luton Town’s football hooligan firm in the early 1980s.

He soon became a regular at the court. In 2011 he was given a 12-month community rehabilitation order for being involved in a major football brawl the previous year. As violence flared between Luton Town and Newport County fans chanted ‘EDL until I die’.

Robinson was sentenced to ten months in prison in January 2013 for traveling on someone else’s passport to a planned speaking event in the US in order to avoid an entry ban. Later that year he left the EDL because, in his words, it had become “too extreme”.

He was jailed for 18 months in 2014 for a complex mortgage fraud that netted him £160,000 over a six-month period, the court heard. Other prison sentences included extended lengths of time that nearly caused a grooming case to collapse. On this occasion, he posted a video of the defendants on Facebook while the trial was ongoing and encouraged ‘unlawful action’.

Little was heard from Robinson, a divorced father of three, for five years after he was expelled from Twitter in 2018 for violating rules on hate speech.

The following year, both Facebook and Instagram took similar actions. ‘I’m back, who missed me?’ With his post, he announced his return to social media without regret. Days after his account was reactivated in November 2023 on X, formerly Twitter.

But it wasn’t until the summer of 2024 that Robinson began to make his online presence fully felt again.

Divorced father-of-three Robinson (pictured at the Old Bailey in July 2019) was little heard from for five years after he was kicked off Twitter in 2018 for breaching rules on hate speech

Following the horrific stabbing deaths of three girls in Southport, he fueled trouble and hatred by posting incendiary posts almost non-stop.

As well as providing a running commentary on the riots that gripped Britain in the wake of the stabbings, he harshly criticized the media for describing the protesters as ‘right-wing extremists’ and attacked the then Home Secretary Yvette Cooper for calling them ‘thugs’.

It is understood that one of Robinson’s main sources of income is ‘independent journalism’ brand Urban Scoop, which he uses to sell his books and fundraise.

It has also received funding from a number of wealthy American backers, as well as the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, a pro-Israel think tank that describes itself as ‘working to protect Western civilization from the threat of Islamism’.

Robinson has previously mentioned financial support from US tech billionaire Robert Shillman. The 80-year-old man, who made his fortune through barcode firm Cognex, reportedly donated $100,000 to the Unite the Kingdom rally in London last month.

Robinson has been repeatedly backed since 2024 by X owner and trillionaire Elon Musk; he too, of course, added his unwelcome money to the Makerfield byelection rhetoric by voicing his support for Restore Britain.

Others who support him include Canadian academic Jordan Peterson and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

They clearly had no opportunity to get a proper look at Tommy Robinson from vantage points across the Atlantic. Anyone on British soil with eyes in their head and rubbing more than a few brain cells together can see that he is a toxic, hateful rabble-rouser.

However, it is clear from Rupert Lowe’s speeches over the weekend.