LONDON — The man known as Tommy Robinson is a 36-year-old father of three from Luton, England, with a history of violence and multiple spells in prison.

A veteran of far-right street movements, he does not — yet — have a political party to call home, refuses to talk to the mainstream media and has been kicked off Twitter.

Yet Robinson — whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — can lay credible claim to being one of the most influential people in British politics, alongside top-rank politicians such as Prime Minister Theresa May, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and former Foreign Minister Boris Johnson.

With more than 1 million followers on Facebook, the anti-Muslim activist is the biggest beneficiary of a burgeoning ecosystem of right-wing populist media — a loose web of networked social media pages, video accounts and hyper-partisan news sites that amplify each other’s messages, providing figures such as Robinson reach rivaling traditional media outfits.

The power of this digital uprising to reshape politics offline has yet to be tested at the ballot box, though many argue recent Yellow Jackets protests in France illustrate the ease with which memes and viral videos can have real-world consequences. The U.K. government increasingly worries about the threat posed by this populist web, whose editors are nameless and whose stars, like Robinson, command huge followings.

“How could somebody like [Tommy Robinson] appear in British politics in normal times?” — Veteran Tory MP Ken Clarke

After he was jailed for contempt of court in May, Robinson became a cause célèbre among the international populist right. His cause was picked up by figures such as U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon and far-right Dutch leader Geert Wilders.

More recently, Robinson has been in the news again — this time for taking a step in the direction of electoral politics. Late last month, he was appointed as a political adviser to Gerard Batten, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, triggering an exodus of the party’s old guard, including former leaders Nigel Farage and Paul Nuttall, who said they were dismayed at the party’s swerve toward the far-right.

Concern about Robinson’s increasing influence is shared across the political spectrum.

“How could somebody like [Tommy Robinson] appear in British politics in normal times?” said veteran Tory MP Ken Clarke, when asked about the far-right figure.

Robinson could not be reached for comment for this article.

Contempt of court

Robinson is short, squat and angry, with closely cropped hair, a jutting jaw and a sleeve of tattoos, including a crusader knight and a quote from Winston Churchill: “There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word, which means more to me than any other. That word is England.”

He first laid claim to notoriety as founder of the English Defense League, an anti-Muslim street movement that bubbled up out of simmering race tensions in the town of Luton, north of London, in 2009.

Robinson, who took his pseudonym from a prominent football hooligan, was previously a member of the overtly racist British National Party for a year in 2004. The EDL consisted mostly of loose groups of football hooligans leading street demonstrations against “the rise of radical Islam.” It gave Robinson a platform, allowing him to lead rallies and appear on television talk shows.

Robinson resists being labeled as racist or even anti-Muslim, and in 2013 he quit the EDL, expressing concerns about “far-right extremism.” He then worked with Quilliam, a think tank dedicated to countering extremism, especially radical Islamism, before quickly returning to anti-Muslim campaigning.

“He’s a drifter, who is chaotic and untrustworthy,” said David Toube, Quilliam’s director of policy. “He’s a guy who’s seen the main chance and gone for it.”

Before being jailed for contempt of court earlier this year, Robinson had already spent time in prison for assaulting a police officer, mortgage fraud and entering the U.S. on a false passport. But the contempt conviction turned his incarceration into a political cause.

“Tommy Robinson was able to play on the perception that liberal politicians and institutions were turning a blind eye to the issue of grooming gangs" — David Toube

By then Robinson had built up a powerful social media presence, which he used to highlight crimes by Muslims and refugees, including terrorist attacks and so-called grooming gangs: the systematic rape and abuse of girls as young as 11 by groups of mostly British Pakistani men.

He was held in contempt of court for violating reporting restrictions by carrying out a Facebook live video report outside a rape gang trial at Leeds crown court.

Robinson’s imprisonment turned him into right-wing social media martyr. News of his travails ricocheted across Britain’s rapidly growing populist media, then shot across the Atlantic to right-wing U.S. news sites and burst through into traditional media.

“Tommy Robinson was able to play on the perception that liberal politicians and institutions were turning a blind eye to the issue of grooming gangs,” said Toube. “That failure allowed him to step into the breach and capitalize on the issue. Worse: It has made it easy for Tommy Robinson to dismiss proper criticism of his scaremongering as the sort of thing that the ‘liberal elite’ would say to ‘cover up the truth.’”

It is a theme Robinson returns to again and again. After a “Brexit betrayal” march on Sunday December 9, which was widely panned as a flop in the media, Robinson took to his Facebook page to attack the “lies.”

“TENS OF THOUSANDS of normal everyday people descended on London today to peacefully protest about the Brexit Betrayal,” he wrote. “The MSM and establishment are just so scared!”

In June, the conspiratorial U.S. media site Infowars warned that Robinson faced “certain death” after being transferred to a “Muslim prison” in the U.K. as he awaited his appeal.

Robinson was released on August 1 after an appeals court ordered a retrial. The case is still ongoing, even as Robinson’s influence has continued to grow.

Winning the numbers game

Robinson’s 1 million Facebook followers make him the second most-popular British political figure on the social media platform, behind Jeremy Corbyn, with 1.4 million. Theresa May and Boris Johnson both have fewer than 600,000.

On social media, often more people are reading and sharing stories about Robinson than almost any major political figure, according to figures compiled by the social media monitoring service Newswhip.

The week following his imprisonment for contempt stories about him were read, shared and commented on 1.2 million times on Facebook and other social media sites.

Apart from May, no other major political figures in the country reached this level of online interest over any seven-day period this year.

Robinson’s numbers are undoubtedly boosted by interest from the right in the U.S.

Corbyn’s high point came in mid-August at the height of an anti-Semitism crisis, when stories about the Labour leader topped 600,000 social media interactions in a week. Up until December, May’s was in July — as her Cabinet came close to falling apart after the Chequers summit to agree a new Brexit plan — when she hit 2.7 million interactions in a week.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the prime minister is by far the biggest U.K. political figure on social media, averaging 607,000 interactions a week. Robinson meanwhile, racked up a weekly average of 175,000, putting him in the same league as Boris Johnson (180,000) and Corbyn (219,000).

But when it comes to interactions per story, Robinson is the runaway winner. Over the whole year, Robinson stories generated an average of 1,164 interactions each. That’s more than double the next political figure on the list: arch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, who gets 660 interactions per story. Next is Nigel Farage with 550, then Corbyn with 326 interactions per story, then Johnson with 245, followed by May with 177.

Robinson’s numbers are undoubtedly boosted by interest from the right in the U.S. Four of the most viral stories about Robinson, according to Newswhip, were written by popular U.S. conservative websites, InfoWars, Breitbart, Fox News and Dangerous.com. But U.K. stories about Robinson in the mainstream publications MailOnline and Metro.co.uk have also gone viral.

Inside No. 10 Downing Street there is a weary recognition of the Robinson cut-through. “We’re not oblivious to that fact,” one government official said.

Small base

Were Robinson to try to leverage his online popularity into votes at the ballot box, there’s no guarantee he would succeed. Exclusive polling for POLITICO by the U.S. firm GQR research reveals Robinson’s support base remains small.

In a survey of 1,447 adults in September, only 8 percent said they knew what he stood for and agreed with it. Some 32 percent knew and disagreed, while the rest didn’t know. Only 11 percent said he was “on their side,” while 40 percent said he was not.

For people who did know about him, his defining features were racism, prejudice against Muslims, and being dangerous. Overall, the public did not believe he was patriotic, brave or genuine — the traits his supporters see in him — though almost a third (28 percent) said he was “fighting for what he believes in.” This, however, is smaller than the proportion who think he’s racist — 30 percent.

Numbers like these haven’t stopped UKIP leader Batten from taking a gamble on Robinson and his army of online followers. Batten maintains that Robinson represents “ordinary, decent working-class people … who were the backbone of the [Brexit] vote in 2016.”

Both men have made no secret of their desire that Robinson join UKIP, with Batten, 64, expressing admiration for the younger man’s social media firepower.

“Let this be the start of a political mass movement in this country" — Tommy Robinson

“I’m not an unqualified supporter of his,” said Batten, who has been working to transform UKIP into a populist party, similar to those found in Europe. “He’s done some things he shouldn’t have. He’s rash and reckless. But if he wasn’t that man, he wouldn’t have had the courage to stand up against the forces he’s standing up against, which are evil. He’s far more good than he is bad.”

It doesn’t hurt, Batten added, that Robinson brings so much internet star power to a political party that has struggled for support after the 2016 Brexit referendum. “To get anywhere under [Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system], you have to be a mass movement. Sometimes you have to take risks to do that.”

Robinson has hinted about where he sees his future. Speaking at the December 9 Brexit “betrayal” rally, he said: “Let this be the start of a political mass movement in this country.”

Robinson has said he would like to join UKIP, but has been prevented from doing so by a Farage-era ban on members or former members of far-right political parties.

The party’s ruling body deferred a decision in December on whether to make an exception for Robinson. They are expected to take the matter up again after March 29, 2019, when the U.K. is due to leave the EU.

Were he to be allowed in, Robinson would be eligible to stand for any position within the party, including the leadership.

Steve Bannon, a vocal supporter, insisted Robinson was not thinking of the leadership, but appeared to welcome the chaos it might cause.

“He doesn’t even want to do it,” Bannon said, sitting on the rooftop of Hotel de Russie on Piazza del Popolo in Rome in September. “It’s a great story. I mean why wouldn’t it be? First off you get Tommy Robinson, you get to lighten up guys that like Tommy Robinson — and you make the British establishment’s head blow off.”

As part of the emergency agreement which saw Batten take over as leader unopposed in the spring, the party veteran promised to hold another election after a year in the job. With Farage’s departure, alongside a dozen other senior figures, the party is devoid of big names to challenge Batten.

Batten himself has not decided whether he is the man to lead the new UKIP and even said he might give up on politics entirely if Brexit is overturned.

“I’ll be 65 next year,” he said. “Do I really want to work seven days a week until I’m 70 years old?”

This is the third in a three-part series on British nationalism and the internet. The first piece looked at how populist news sites have got the government worried. The second piece looks at the rise of UKIP's YouTubers.