Tommy Robinson: Inside the life of UK right wing firebrand tied to Karl Stefanovic’s Nine dumping

The man known as Tommy Robinson had a past life as an aircraft engineer, born with the name Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon in Luton in 1982.

But it was as Tommy Robinson - the moniker he later took from a local football hooligan - that he began his rise to notoriety in 2009 as founder of the anti-Islamic English Defence League. Robinson, who had already done stints in the British National Party and served a 12-month jail sentence for assaulting police, formed the EDL with his cousin in response to reports of Islamists being recruited in his local area to join the Taliban in Afghanistan.

It was 2011 that proved to be one of Robinson’s defining years. It was then that he faced court over a 100-man football brawl in which he chanted “EDL until I die”. Despite receiving just a rehabilitation order and a ban on attending football matches, he was arrested just months later for breaching bail through his attendance at an EDL protest in London.

While on remand, he harnessed his brief incarceration by declaring himself a “political prisoner” and beginning a hunger strike, soon attracting 100 of his EDL followers to vigils outside HM Bedford prison.

Just over two weeks after his release, on September 29, 2011, Robinson was convicted of common assault over an April attack on a fellow EDL member at a rally and received yet another suspended sentence. In November he was jailed for three days over a protest on the rooftop of FIFA’s base in Switzerland, in response to the international football body’s ban on the English football team wearing a Remembrance poppy.

Then in December 2011, he was reportedly attacked in his car by what he described as a group bearing Asian appearance.

In 2012, Robinson’s prominence led to him featuring in a series of televised dinner appearances with high-profile UK Muslim, Mo Ansar in which both men discussed the role of British Islam, soon leading Robinson to decide to leave the EDL the following year.

While Robinson told the BBC he would still aim to “counter Islamist ideology”, he said he would be seeking to do so “not with violence but with better, democratic ideas”.

“I have been considering this move for a long time because I recognise that, though street demonstrations have brought us to this point, they are no longer productive,” he said.

“I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.”

Robinson’s shift towards a less confrontational style still attracted controversy - in 2014 an appearance at Oxford drew a large protest as he told his audience that certain UK prisons were becoming “training camps” for the Islamic State terror group.

Robinson took his anti-Islamic stance to an international level with Canadian far-right website Rebel News, which had initially approached him in 2015. He declared that Great Britain was “at war” following two terror attacks on UK soil - at Westminster Bridge and Manchester Arena in 2017. His two videos in response to both attacks have been viewed millions of times, with Robinson’s profile soon skyrocketing.

In 2018, he was also incarcerated - this time for contempt of court when he was found to have filmed a sexual assault case in 2017 for Rebel News from inside the Canterbury Law Courts and in which he also described the defendants as “Muslim child rapists” while the jury was still deliberating the case. However, his suspended three-month jail sentence was only activated in 2018 after yet another contempt of court case against him.

In 2018, he declared his desire to join the UK Independence Party and his subsequent appointment as then-leader Gerard Batten’s adviser prompted then-UKIP member Nigel Farage’s description of the Luton lad as a “thug” and the resignation of eight UKIP Members of European Parliament, including Farage.

Robinson went on to flirt with electoral politics on a number of occasions, including an unsuccessful attempt as a candidate in 2019’s European Parliament elections in England’s north-west.

Robinson’s stance wasn’t just limited to Islamic extremism. In 2019, he wore a badge which appeared to back a British soldier - known only as “Soldier F” facing charges with murdering civilians during Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. The badge simply read: “I support soldiers A-Z”.

By then Robinson’s online profile, boosted by the Brexit referendum, was stratospheric. One of his stints in prison for a contempt of court charge was dubbed by Donald Trump Jr as “reason #1776 for the original Brexit” online. Investigations by The Guardian found that by this time Robinson was receiving funds from three US thinktanks. He also travelled to Russia, where he not only voiced support for Vladimir Putin and held a number of public appearances in 2020.

Far from stepping away from Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine, Robinson instead was found to have spread pro-Russian information about the war and even went on to meet with Elon Musk’s controversial father in a Moscow hotel in 2026.

Alerted to the fact BBC investigative program Panorama was about to launch an episode delving into his life, in 2019 Robinson launched a rally outside the British broadcaster’s office which drew 4000 people.

During the pandemic, he sidetracked into lockdown protests before returning to Islam in 2022 with a documentary-style video in response to the Telford child exploitation scandal - a UK grooming scandal reportedly involving up to 1000 victims in which many alleged offenders were described as having South Asian appearances.

He kept up a number of anti-Islam protests but most recently played a leading role in the violent unrest surrounding the 2024 Southport stabbings in which a number of children were slain in a knife attack allegedly carried out by the son of Rwandan asylum seekers.

Despite the alleged attacker’s Christian upbringing, Robinson amplified false claims that the attacker was a muslim asylum seeker, as unrest spilled across the United Kingdom. Robinson’s name was reportedly chanted by rioters wreaking havoc in Southport, leading investigators to probe his role in inciting the unrest.

Undeterred, Robinson went on to play a central part in his Unite The Kingdom rallies, which drew more than 100,000 protesters to the streets of London in September 2025. Twenty-six police officers were injured by flying bottles and projectiles while 25 people were arrested as tensions flared at the march, where fellow agitator Elon Musk addressed the crowd from a videolink. Robinson described the march as a “freedom of speech festival”.

He would go on to organise a smaller Unite The Kingdom event in May, 2026, this time attracting just 60,000.

However it was later that month that Robinson would find himself on the same page as former UKIP foe Farage, playing a central role in the widespread demonstrations over the stabbing death of Henry Nowak outside a house party. Damning police footage showed officers arresting Nowak, after his killer Vickrum Singh Diwa, lied to police that he was the one who had been the victim of a racial attack.