A meeting with Britain’s most hated man

‘Christ, I would be shot for buying this if people knew,’ says an anonymous fan in the comments below Amazon’s unlikely bestseller Enemy of the State. Which sums up how I feel before meeting the book’s author, Tommy Robinson. What if he turns out to be not nearly as bad as his reputation as ‘Britain’s most hated man’? What if, as some familiar with him have warned, I turn out to like him and want to plead his cause, and end up being tainted as a far-right thug by association?

We meet in a gastropub in a pretty Georgian market town. It’s only ten minutes from the ‘shithole’ of a dump where Robinson has always lived — Luton — and much more congenial for lunch because we’re less likely to be interrupted by any of the numerous Muslims who have put him on their death list. Robinson, 34, is wearing Stone Island, the preferred expensive attire (about £800 for a jacket) of violent football hooligans like the one he used to be himself.

Robinson is frank about his misspent youth: his first stint in jail for assaulting a plainclothes policeman; his second one for mortgage fraud; his brawls with rival teams as a member of Luton City’s Men In Gear football crew (he thinks Millwall’s bad-boy reputation is overrated; Tottenham has the best firm). He is frank about everything he’s done, good and bad. It’s part of the natural charm which, just over two years ago, won the hearts of an at first spittingly hostile audience at the Oxford Union.

And yes, I do like him. So would you if you spent a couple of hours in his company. He’s intelligent, quick, articulate, well-informed, good-mannered — and surprisingly meek in his politics for a man so often branded a fascist.