Tommy Robinson s Right-Hand Man Is Turning Online Hate Into an Anti-Migrant Militia

In Portsmouth on Sunday, a man accosted a police officer, saying: “You know who I am? My name’s Danny Tommo. You saw what we did in Dover, and if you don’t stop right now, I’m calling 1,000 men to come to this place.”

He then started to vomit, having run (by his own reckoning) about four breathless miles to get to the lifeboat station in Eastney, where a boat was offboarding a group of migrants who had been rescued at sea.

Live-streaming his adventure to an audience on YouTube, he jumped over fences, making up for a lack of athleticism with a wild-eyed sense of urgency and determination. “If we’re being sick by the time we get there, we’re being sick – let’s go,” he said, panting as he ran.

He encouraged both those he encountered in the street and those watching – “every man and his dog” – to join him. By the end of the night, around 200 people had gathered around the harbour, some wearing masks, confronting riot police in order to stop the arrival of 120 people who had been travelling to the UK in a single dinghy.

But who is this queasy, far-right Pied Piper?

Daniel Thomas, a man with a history of grim but farcical missteps. In 2016, he was one of three men jailed for attempting to kidnap the wrong person at knifepoint, as they tried to retrieve £10,000. After he was released, he styled himself ‘Danny Tommo’ and became an associate of Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He is a born-again Christian and describes himself as a “guardian of faith”. In recent months, Tommo has gained prominence as an influencer in his own right – perhaps most memorably by angrily demanding answers from the police over a crime that never happened, in the process causing a riot in the usually tranquil commuter town of Epsom in Surrey.

Last year, Tommo attached himself to Raise the Colours – the activist group which erected union jack and St George’s Cross flags across the country – and its founder, Ryan Bridge. The pair became anti-migrant vigilantes in northern France, filming themselves slashing dinghies. They were planning something called Operation Overlord (named in reference to D-Day in 1944, on which allied armies began liberating Nazi-occupied Europe), aiming to storm the channel with boats. But Tommo and Bridge then fell out in a messy public spat, accusing each other of chasing fame and throwing out unproven allegations of misusing donations.

The YouTube livestream from Portsmouth, which has nearly 700,000 views at the time of writing, is certainly a bizarre watch. At one moment, Tommo is on the shore shouting at the police about alleged sex crimes perpetrated by migrants. The next, he is wading into the water, warning police “I will drown myself if you come near me” – apparently about to fulfil anti-fascists’ long-held wish for the far right to “get in the sea”.

But while the stream is strange at times, it also shows how far-right figures are organising and the blurred line between the online world and real life.

Tommo barks instructions, both to those on the streets and beaches where he is and to those watching the stream on their phones and computers. At one point, he notices three coaches poised to take the arriving migrants away and decides they need to be blocked. He tells one of his comrades to get his car, then turns to the online audience and says: “We need a road blockage at the Eastney entrance of Portsmouth. Someone get down there with a load of cars and put your cars in front of the entrance.” More than once on the stream, he encourages those who are a couple of hours drive away to come and join, reassuring them he will still be there.

His calls only worked to an extent. Tommo’s threat to bring 1,000 men were exaggerated (200 people, seemingly mainly locals, turned out), and his call for a boat blockade to follow the RNLI lifeboats fell flat (the only boat to arrive was a lone kayak). Nonetheless, Tommo was “experimenting with converting an online audience into capacity on the ground,” according to Lewis Nielson, antifascist officer at Stand Up To Racism. For this reason, it would be wrong to dismiss Tommo as a mere grifter, he suggests. “It’s not mere spectacle instead of organisation. The spectacle is itself a technique of organising”, said Nielson.

The arrival of a lifeboat full of asylum seekers to Portsmouth, where Tommo lives, was an opportunity that appeared to fall into his lap. But the day before, a large group of protesters dressed in black and wearing balaclavas blocked roads around the Dover port for several hours by standing in a block, chanting “Whose streets? Our streets” and “Stop the boats”. This more organised affair was coordinated by Patriotic Platform, a new organisation set up by Tommo only a few weeks ago. It managed to pull off the action while escaping the notice of Kent police.

With its relative discipline and use of direct action, the protest in Dover looks different to far-right mobilisations we have become used to: on the one hand heavily promoted, set piece mass rallies in central London where far-right influencers speakers give repetitive speeches and ask for money; on the other, chaotic flashes of violent activity in the wake of news events, such as the rioting in Southampton following the death of Henry Nowak (which seem to fizzle out as quickly as rioters arrived).

Alex Roberts from antifascist research group and podcast Red Flare sees Patriotic Platform on a continuum with these other forms of far-right activity. “I see it as building on the work of Tommy Robinson,” he said. What’s new is that “Tommo is operationalising Robinson’s supporter base in a way that Robinson is not interested in doing.” (Robinson has been happy to jump on the bandwagon, however, boosting Tommo’s content from Portsmouth on X and interviewing him for his podcast.)

Images of masked men in Dover have prompted responses from more mainstream rightwing figures. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage wrote in the Telegraph that his party would ban face coverings in public if they won power. “No ifs, no buts. And yes, that includes religious ones too,” he said. Rupert Lowe, leader of the far-right Restore Britain, then jumped into the space left by Farage’s outfit, coming out in support of the protests and saying that wearing masks is “undesirable” but understandable given “two-tier policing”.

But while there is concern over the tactics, there is a broad political consensus around Tommo’s position on migration.

On Monday, Tommo challenged Zia Yusuf over Farage’s comments, interrupting the Reform home affairs spokesperson as he conducted media interviews in Portsmouth. Yusuf was keen to find common ground: the pair agreed that Farage is a “hero” for work raising concerns around migration, and Yusuf only raised concerns around masks wearing.

More broadly, Tommo is pushing at an open door. Donna Jones, the Conservative police and crime commissioner for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, called the protests “a real wake up call to the government that the British people are fed up with the lack of control of our borders.” (Her comments were gleefully seized upon by Robinson.)

Similarly, Mike Tapp, Labour MP for Dover and Deal, criticised the inconvenience of the protest without seeking to change the narrative around “small boats”. On Saturday, he posted on Facebook: “Park run cancelled and port access disrupted. I am fed up with idiots coming to Dover to cause disruption. I bet if you asked any one of those ‘protesters’ they wouldn’t know small boat crossing [sic] are down by 40% and we are working hard to fix the mess.”