Has there ever been a less seemly rush than that by elements of the far right to get on the airwaves and present themselves as Tommy Robinson’s best little media helper since his release on Wednesday? I mean, apart from the rush to book them on said airwaves? By now, you will be aware that English Defence League founder and tanning salonista Tommy Robinson was freed from prison this week, after the court of appeal judged that one of his contempt of court rulings was flawed, and ordered that he be retrialled on the charge.

Let me tell you something: when the Stone Island Roderick Spode walks out of HMP Onley with his personal effects in three black holdalls, there is a hell of a lot of reflected stardust to play for. And out they all came: Katie Hopkins; Hopkins’s Canadian organ grinder; former Farage spokesprick Raheem Kassam (now at Breitbart); current Ukip leader/pub quiz question Gerard Batten, as well as any number of international arses keen to personally associate themselves with a man who Steve Bannon recently anointed as “the backbone of this country”, and who Donald Trump Jr recently supported. (“I’d have done six months just for that recognition,” Robinson reportedly said.) There was pointed silence from Nigel Farage – but we’ll come to that later.

Each jockeyed to give the sense of most familiarity with someone even the BBC’s home affairs correspondent repeatedly referred to simply as “Tommy”, as though he were Cher or Madonna, and not a criminal in fact called Stephen. Anyway, there was Ezra Levant, whose rightwing Canadian media firm used to employ Robinson and now employs Hopkins, who boasted that he’d been in the inner sanctum, and “spent time with Tommy Robinson and his beautiful family”. He capped his day with a BBC interview with Eddie Mair during which he repeatedly produced the word “impute”, though not in a way which imputed to himself even a basic understanding of UK law.

Then there was dear old Abu Hopkins herself, who could certainly use a coattail to cling on to these days, and was perhaps seeking to position herself as the Winnie Mandela to Robinson’s Nelson. “Did they starve him in HMP Onley too?” she fretted in response to the video of Robinson walking out of prison. “Lord, he looks thin.”

Incidentally, it was notable how many of Robinson’s high-profile supporters – even extreme fattists such as Hopkins – affected agonised concern about his weight. And yet, his BMI seemed to me – how to put this? – rather healthier for a man of his stature than what he’d carried in a few months ago. But, as indicated, this was not a view shared by the likes of Mike Cernovich (he of the Pizzagate conspiracy). Cernovich judged that “the UK government starved him”, and immediately called for the trial of British diplomats in the US “as criminals who put political prisoners into concentration camps”. He later appeared to change his mind and demanded instead the expulsion of the British embassy from the US, as well as “regime change” in the UK.

The Eurotrash far right, meanwhile, were represented by Geert Wilders, who tweeted: “Tommy a free man again. Resistance works. Lots of respect for @RaheemKassam and @ezralevant for all their effort and fantastic work.”

And so to Kassam, who appeared on the Today programme and honked all kinds of nonsense without a grown-up expert having been booked to counter him. Given the frequency with which climate scientists and so on are required to argue against denialists “for balance”, it does seem slightly eccentric to allow Kassam on without a law expert to counter his misapprehensions – a situation which permitted him to present himself as tenuously coherent, when the reality is something else.

Forgive the legal technicalese, but Kassam is just a nebbishy shitposter. He is chiefly known for trailing round after Farage in the classic Farage costume – the classic being the covert coat, made of tan stuff with a dark-brown velvet collar. I mentioned this in passing once before, and Raheem took the trouble to get in touch to explain hotly that he’d bought his coat before Nigel had bought his. Please do adjust your timelines accordingly.

Anyway, watching the clusterfuck unfold over the course of a news cycle raised two clear questions. 1) Just how big of a narcissistic shit is Tommy Robinson? And 2) Are hitherto relatively disparate elements on the far right coalescing into something more cohesive? We’ll look at the second one in a bit.

The answer to the first can be dealt with fairly swiftly. For clarity, Robinson is the sort of man who made sure a camera was on hand to record what you might think would have been the day’s most intensely private moment – his reunification with two of his young children – and promptly put the footage online. This is the EDL version of flogging your wedding to OK! magazine, and should be judged accordingly. I’m joking, of course – it’s so much worse. If you watch the video, you will see that Robinson’s son, notably, is in absolutely desperate floods of tears, and the thought of someone carefully keeping the camera trained on it all, packaging it, in order that the emotion might be immediately politicised is a helpful reminder of what you’re dealing with. Not helpful for the child, you understand. But helpful nonetheless.

Sensing his priorities, Robinson decided that his public demanded a series of videos, which he obligingly filmed, casting himself yet again as a political prisoner and free-speech martyr. “What they tried to do was to mentally destroy me,” he quavered in one. “That wasn’t a prison sentence, that was mental torture.” To which the only response is: well, you shouldn’t keep nearly causing mistrials of child rapists then, should you? Once may be regarded as unfortunate; twice is a thug’s strategy to subvert justice.

Alas, Robinson declined to put this most recent stretch in perspective by saying whether he had felt the same sense of mental torture a few years ago, during the nine months of an 18-month sentence he served for a hefty mortgage fraud – or, indeed, whether he would have suffered mental torture if he’d got some custodial for the attack on his partner, during which an off-duty police officer who tried to intervene was injured.

And so to the sense that some of the currents on the far right are joining up more formally. Certainly, Kassam’s Today blustering saw him trying to convey a closeness with “Steve” (Bannon), declaring “we are going to build a legitimate, a serious, organisation that is doing things legally and above board that will help unite what we think of as patriotic parties across the continent”. Yet as an excellent article by Cas Mudde made clear this week, Bannon’s reach is overrated. “In short,” Mudde explained, “Bannon is bandwagonning successful European leaders on the radical right in the hope of regaining political relevance.”

As for the other angles, some detect the hand of Farage in facilitating Bannon’s much-reported recent discussions with the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, Farage being not quite the Westminster outsider-pariah he styles himself as. But the Bannon love is not shared among Farage’s allies. Some time ago, a froideur developed between Arron Banks and Farage over the latter’s closeness to Bannon, with Banks feeling that Bannon was Not A Good Thing At All.

Even so, fuelled by the government’s disastrous handling of basically everything since the Brexit vote two years ago, all manner of rightwingers and far rightwingers are now on manoeuvres. On Talk Radio, Ukip’s Gerard Batten was declaring, “I can’t speak for Tommy, but I think it might be similar to what I’m trying to do, maybe in a less flamboyant way.” Flamboyant! I like how Gerard sees Tommy as the Liberace of the far right – but he is surely deluded if he thinks he’s on anything other than borrowed time with the Ukip job, a glorified bogseat warmer for Farage.

Farage is simply deciding on the timing of his return to UK politics, which is now surely inevitable (as, indeed, it was about halfway through the last resignation speech of his I attended). It seems likely that he would seek to repurpose Ukip, which has slightly come back in the polls. Which is to say, it’s not literally flatlining any more – but it crucially retains an electoral machine which took a long time to build up, as such things do, and into which a new movement could be reversed.

But not a movement in which Tommy Robinson would feature. Robinson is anathema to Farage, who was very studiously silent on his release. Aside from the fact he will have spent Wednesday furious at the attention Robinson was getting, part of Farage’s personal mythology has always been that it is his personage, his leadership that kept such thuggish elements at bay. Quite how Farage and Robinson will fight it out in these ominous times remains to be seen. But for the rest of us, it’s fair to say the only thing worse than one dark star rising again, is two.