“My kids are crying. We come here so I could spend some quality time with them. Now they are scared people are coming here to get them.” Thus bleated Tommy Robinson from the five-star Ayia Napa all-inclusive hotel from which he is currently influencing sustained violent disorder on Britain’s streets.
And yet, multiple paparazzi photos from the resort show Daddy either floating like a lonesome turd in the pool, or splayed out on a four-poster sunlounger glued to his phone, with not even a pixelated Sproginson to be seen. Perhaps they were fomenting looting in the kids’ club? If not, Pops has certainly broken with the form book by not coopting them into his war games. Robinson’s previous stunts have included filming his disturbingly tearful children on the day he emerged from one of his prison sentences (it was the attempting-to-collapse-a-rape-trial one, I think, as opposed to the massive-mortgage-fraud one).
The EDL founder immediately packaged and publicised what should surely have been a private family moment as a donation-driving propaganda video. Kerching! Robinson’s current means of funding five-star holidays remain opaque – although I think most of us have zeroed in on one particular theory – but they clearly far outstrip the days when he was merely a Luton tanning salonista.
As does his virtual social set. Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox: you don’t have to have taken a divorce well to be currently leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots. But let’s be honest: it helps! Think of this gaggle of would-be civil warfluencers as a loose collective, on which we’ll slap the working title Fathers4Injustice.
Barely a day goes by without the shitposter’s shitposter, Elon Musk, informing the world that in the UK, “civil war is inevitable”. Sorry, but he doesn’t even go here? Surely a better use of the X proprietor’s time would be persuading various of his 12 children to even talk to him, instead of continuing with his sadsack experiment in paying $44bn to act like the world’s disinformer-in-chief.
Meanwhile, that even shiter inciter Laurence Fox was pictured leaving the UK on a flight for Cork on Sunday, also welded to his phone. Ah, the old thought leader’s grindset. “I cannot believe this traitor,” thundered Laurence of a Keir Starmer statement on the riots (dateline: Stansted airport). “For decades British girls have been raped by immigrant barbarians and now he’s finally come out. On their side. Fine. Then it’s war.”
Oh dear. Laurence’s Aryan looks once made him a shoo-in for playing Nazis; these days he just has to issue statements like them. He actually once played Charles de Gaulle, but has now gone full Pétain, if you can imagine the Marshal wearing Nike hi-tops at literally the age of 46 like some ghastly old sex case from a boutique advertising agency. (For the record, I think I probably can.)
As for Nigel Farage, the Clacton MP and owner of Britain’s largest collection of dog whistles is presently blowing the one marked “two-tier policing”. Righto. What about two-tier MPing – that thing where you record an insanely irresponsible video in the wake of the most appalling child murders suggesting “the truth is being withheld from us”, then a few days later emerge from your hidey-hole with a statement affecting to condemn the riots fuelled by just this sort of crap?
Then again, we saw that same nervy clamming up from Nigel after the far-right murder of Jo Cox in the final days of the EU referendum campaign. Farage suddenly went very quiet indeed for a few days, before emerging on the morning after the vote with a historically distasteful speech in which he declared victory had been achieved “without a single bullet being fired”. Within a year he was saying he’d “pick up a rifle” if Brexit wasn’t delivered – and now he’s in Westminster, issuing portentous statements which I note he signs off as “Nigel F”. Why not simply NF? It would arguably make his key points more concisely.
Perhaps his Reform party will soon be joined by Suella Braverman, who has had precisely nothing at all to say on the current violence, would you believe. Her most notable recent public statement concerned her withdrawal from the Conservative leadership stakes, and was headlined “I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous by my own party”. Which, again on the form book, means a lot.
Finally, no hymn to leaders-from-behind would be complete without a mention of the MailOnline, whose comment section I have in recent years read more obsessively and in greater volume than the contents of many newspapers. It is currently quite the window into the fruits of a long-term strand of its coverage, and I can only implore the readers who have been deliberately fed a diet of it to urgently catch up with its metropolitan elite editors, who are now hastily decrying the disorder. Alas, there seems no sign of this happening. Presumably those editors have noticed that every one of their articles condemning the current horror show is followed by absolute torrents of overwhelmingly positive comments in support of the thugs. Even Tommy Robinson’s five-star Ayia Napa war room has been saluted in maudlin terms by that section of the British public that is never happier than when some blatant grifter is making a fool out of them.
Quite how large that section is remains to be seen, but it is not short of blatant grifters to be right behind them. Sometimes thousands of miles behind them, huffing another complimentary frozen margarita – but truly, it’s the thought that counts.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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