Why I interviewed Tommy Robinson. And what I learned

One of the most well known names in the country. Yet few journalists ever speak to the man behind it.

If you watch legacy television or read most papers, you'd struggle to find a recent interview with Tommy Robinson. Shamima Begum, maybe. True crime, limitless.

They might touch on his latest march or gathering, with left wing press making sure to zealously reiterate and tar every attendant as ‘Far Right’. 

Many dig up archive footage and photos, portraying him as a snarling, thuggish thicko. And yet few ever pause to ask why hundreds of thousands of people showed support for his rally, or why his self produced documentaries attract millions of views. As far as I can see via a slapdash audit, nobody has endeavoured recently to understand what so many people seem to see in him. Instead, the metropolitan disdain of the journalist often takes centre stage.

I have found this both quizzical and concerning for a long time now.

Often it is the foreign press who ask the right questions. Who want to understand what is going on in Britain. Our cultural custodians simply will it away. And yet time often proves most phenomena are portents.

And so I decided to ask Tommy if he’d talk to me. Simply not engaging means not trying to understand the multitudes with Free Tommy banners. Just as the media never wanted to understand UKIP voters a decade ago. I got a sense that I know these people already. And they are depending on people like me to listen. To speak to him, for them.

In doing so, something within me cystallised. Something I knew already, but became searingly obvious as I listened to Stephen Yaxley Lennon recount his early activism.

His alien world of the untouchables is so remote from Fleet Street, the only way most journalists can engage with it is at arms length, and through the prism of a foreboding threat. Not an integral part of their own nation.

It's because, to most of the commentariat, it doesn't make sense. He shouldn't be in the world of politics, social analysis and opinion. Tommy Robinson armed with a camera is an anomaly. He didn't go to university, nor attend a prestigious journalism school. He wears a Burberry T Shirt, which I'm sure delights some among them by stirring up self aggrandizing feelings of superiority through being able to pejoratively fetishise the working class. He doesn't belong in their world. Not an ill-educated, brute that should have stayed on his sink estate and understood his station in life. And as for anyone who follows him? Well, they're surely the same. The useless, toothless, grubby idiots who voted for Brexit and don't have the grace nor intelligence to truly understand immigration. Yet perhaps due to their unsheltered viewpoint, they have an unhindered view.

Some have sneered at the crowdfund set up for him while he's in prison. Pay now and buy Tommy some coke! Tommy needs some new trainers! Look at all the money he is making in his Fascist cause! These, the educated elite. The very people who should understand that the fundamental tenet of fascism is control of thought and word.

Rather than having been conveyed along the travelator of privilege from a public school, to university, to a cosy job and ever higher up the ladder with every resource and leg-up one could wish for, he's done it himself. Just not with their people behind the cordon sanitaire. No middle class podcaster, charity executive, newspaper columnist nor think tanker would consider earning money from their activism somehow compromises their cause. After all, theirs is a noble pursuit that deserves rich rewards.

There is a laughable irony in the eagerness of a particular type to assume Tommy Robinson spends his money on booze and coke. Especially when such things are the fuel of the chattering middle class. A sizeable amount of squeamishness is patent hypocrisy. Rooted in classism.

A sneering, snobby, spite fuelled rancour was so keenly on full display during the Brexit years and has now found a new, perfect opportunity to be paraded once again. In Tommy they have a fresh, fitting fix about which they can puff their chests with superiority and exhibit high handedness in the most delicious, dinner-party-destined way. It must be an inconvenience that their previous Bete Noire Mr Farage now sits on the Green Benches. Tommy, however, is in prison.

Tommy lends himself to their disdain. Not only is he lauded among the working class. He is one of them. His wrongs have been tried in the courts of the land and he has been deemed unfit for public consumption. Meanwhile there has always been something about the working class that those above find romantic, yet disgusting and dangerous simultaneously.

Perhaps some fear the native working class because they have different codes and systems that their own lives lack. Survival strategies, suspicions and support networks borne out of necessity. A resilience they have never needed. They are in and out of each other's houses, have learnt life lessons that will forever evade many others, and have a generosity and loyalty that others envy and distrust.

Interviewing Tommy, something struck me. His upbringing on a chaotic estate where drugs were dealt, where allegiances and rivalries collided in a survival of the fittest that bred both steadfast loyalty and simmering grudges, has permeated his very being like letters within a stick of rock. To Tommy, it's about honour. It's about stepping up, defending the clan and fearing nobody. After all, he's only ever had so little to lose, with a sense of so much being at stake. The mindset of a fighter in a dog-eat-dog world. Plus a deep rooted sense that the system wasn't for people like him, so f*ck it. Break it. Rage against it.

It also struck me that, had by some twist of fate, young Stephen Lennon been born into an upper middle class family, where the mechanisms of society worked in his favour, he would have been naturally equipped to rise to the top. In a parallel universe of opportunity and privilege he would likely have wiped the floor with his classmates. Oxbridge might have been on the cards and a career as a lawyer could likely have awaited. For far from stupid, he has a brain that motors frantically, a mental agility that dodges, weaves and ducks. And while he stumbles over the sort of academic vocabulary a Russell Group graduate has had environmentally imbued into their posterior superior temporal lobe, the man can communicate. That is evidenced by his swathes of acolytes in numbers most politicians should envy.

The problem is, the Stephen Lennons of this world don't get the opportunity to rise. They are increasingly eternally condemned to the corners of the country where the perils of mass immigration decimate their communities. Where the decent enough jobs in industry have been given away. The potential of a career in the military robbed through ever cut troop numbers.

Their local boozer has been boarded up, unable to offset soaring costs by selling £25 gin and tonics to a clientele where the price of a pint is immaterial. Their neighbours increasingly don't know their names, sometimes not even their language. Their life stories are rarely told. Their futures are totally irrelevant to anybody else. And their worth is increasingly easily replaced by someone imported from abroad.

Working in pubs and nightclubs in Gloucester to pay my way through university, I have glimpsed at the chaos that can come with others’ struggle and strife. During the holidays, I would make crassly named cocktails for small-time gangsters, then during term time, serve boules of champagne to the progeny of minor European royals. I have lived among paradigm characters on both sIdes.

And yet while a middle class alcoholic exposed through a public breakdown can be celebrated for a mea culpa in a thoughtful column or get a book contract about mental health; while even a converted terrorist can be lionised for a miraculous Damescene Conversation and voraciously platformed as a beautiful curio, there is no redemption for the working class. Their imperfections remain ugly smears that they must carry as scarlet letters to close doors at every turn.

That is the fascinating thing about Tommy. Despite the demonisation, he has only grown bigger. Accrued more followers. Been invited to the Oxford Union where a room of the world's most privileged sat rapt as they listened to him paint a picture of his brutal, alien world. Prison hasn't prevented him. It's made him a martyr to many.

Tommy is a phenomenon, borne out of a perfectly aligned cocktail of increasing sociological necessity in a frantically changing world, and the emergence of man who, with dogged and reckless determination, has decided that this will be a fight to the end. A fight almost nobody else dares to enter. And fight he does. For good or for bad, this is now his cause, regardless of repercussions.

Underneath Tommy, is Stephen. Or Yax. A kid raised with street smarts, honour amongst thieves, running with the pack and raging at the world’s injustices. A working class warrior with a hot head and self righteous indignation, impatience and cockiness, fuelled by a tenacity and cunning that gets him into hot water, and out of it again. Yet also a vulnerable man with a copious heart who often rubs his head with frustrated pent up emotion, before swelling up and looming forward with an imposing stance of renewed resilience and a flashing fury in his eyes.

I can see who he is. 

But I doubt most middle classes ever will.

And therein lies the very phenomenon of Tommy. Both born in, and now borne out of, that great gulf: The social schism and unresolved divide at the heart of it all.