‘Army of
patriots’: how a black-clad Christian vigilante group swarmed Portsmouth
Riot
police and far-right protesters clash in Portsmouth
Daniel
Thomas has spent months trying to unify the UK’s disparate far right to form a
disciplined anti-migrant force
Daniel Boffey, Steven Morris, Ben Quinn and Diane Taylor
Tue 8 Sep
2026 05.00 BST
Just a
few days ago, Daniel “Tommo” Thomas let a group of fellow far-right
sympathisers in the north-west of England into a secret. “Groups of men all
across the United Kingdom are joining up as one, as one group of resistance,”
said Thomas, a convicted kidnapper who is a former bodyguard to Tommy Robinson,
real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. “Something is about to go down and it is about
to send a fucking shock wave. What is the end goal of all of this? It is to
start something that will then snowball. Once we pull this off it will then
snowball across the country.”
The
trigger event prophesied by Thomas in a YouTube video last week came to pass on
Saturday morning, when hundreds of masked men dressed in black appeared on the
streets of Dover. By occupying key roundabouts at 7am, the group caused a
4-mile-long queue of traffic along the A20, closing it in both directions.
Perhaps more significantly, a uniformed gathering that brought to mind the
black shirts of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the 1930s
forcefully grabbed the nation’s attention.
Masked
protesters march in Dover
The
spillover – the metastasising of the Dover shock to the system – soon followed
in Portsmouth on Sunday. Thomas’s new organisation – Patriot
Platform – joined a local demonstration being staged in protest at the
arrival of a mega-dinghy of asylum seekers in the Solent, and then pushed it to
go further.
The
mission was not to “wave flags … thinking somehow that it was going to save
us”, as Thomas characterised most far-right activity in the UK in recent years,
but to block those who had landed from moving on from Eastney marina,
near Portsmouth,
where the 120 asylum seekers were being held.
The men
in black were there again in uniform and sought to display what Thomas said was
a new way of doing things: acting with purpose, an understanding of the law and
a discipline in how they behaved. Not that everything went quite to plan as
they stood at 2am in front of a lineup of riot police standing on the road
leading to the marina.
“We’ve
taken the collar number of every one of these officers,” announced Thomas, as
the faces of the police were lit up by his phone in the 2am gloom. He was
livestreaming to about 15,000 viewers of his YouTube channel.
“The ICP
… IPCC will be contacted by our lawyers,” Thomas told the officers and for the
benefit of those watching online, “and if you do anything apart from what your
inspector told you to do … It doesn’t matter what the circumstances are. If you
commit violence to the person, the IPCC will deal with you. You know that, you
know that.”
Police
speak to the far-right Patriot Platform members in the water at Eastney near
Portsmouth. Photograph: Barry Williams/PA
There was
no visible reaction from the weary-looking officers from Hampshire police. The
protest had been going on for hours. But someone was niggled by something that
had been said.
“IOPC,
mate,” chirped an unidentified male at Thomas’s side.
“Eh?”
responded Thomas.
“IOPC,
mate,” the man repeated.
“What?”
asked Thomas, tetchily.
“It’s
IOPC,” chimed in a couple of the other balaclava wearing men, correcting their
leader on the acronym for the Independent Office for Police Conduct.
“No, it’s
IPCC isn’t it? International … Independent Police Complaints Commission. Am I
right, am I right?”
Thomas
was not right and he later appeared to make a bigger mistake. “Oh no – who’s
got my fucking keys,” he groaned, as he and his peers left the harbour around
4am.
1:02
Far-right
activists wade through sea to film asylum seekers in Portsmouth – video
“Fuck,”
said Thomas before ending his live stream. “If there were 10,000 lads here it
would be different,” he told his disappointed viewers of the decision to accept
the police’s dispersal order. “There’s about 200 lads, not even that,” said
Thomas looking around. “You know what – I’m done.”
It may
not have been perfect – but for all the elements of farce on display in
Portsmouth, the events of recent days suggest that those behind the latest wave
of anti-migrant unrest to hit the south coast of England are, as Thomas told
his followers, “starting to do things differently” – and they want people to
know it.
Balaclava-wearing
far-right protesters blocking roundabouts and roads in Dover. Photograph:
Ay_audits/YouTube
On a
sunny Saturday morning in Dover, it had been Anthony Barnes, who goes by the
pseudonym AY Audits or the Hotel Inspector, who was providing rolling footage
to his 134,000 YouTube subscribers. A regular at demonstrations outside hotels
accommodating asylum seekers, Barnes, 46, is due in court later this month for
allegedly breaking a community protection notice banning him from Surrey.
Breathing
heavily, Barnes, a thick-set man, told his viewers as he walked on the seafront
in Dover that “something is happening”. “I’ve got a funny feeling we are about
to see the first resistance of the Patriot Platform,” he panted. It was Barnes’
contention that they were “making history”.
0:57
Riot
police clash with far-right protesters in Portsmouth – video
Thomas, a
former tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars who was medically discharged
before seeing active service and previously drew attention as a regular visitor
to London’s Speakers’ Corner where he filmed himself arguing with Muslims, has
been working on Patriot Platform for a number of months.
Doubts
had been voiced that anything would come of it, but he has been travelling the
country, visiting gatherings of far-right political parties and anti-migration
meetings, seeking to bring the disparate far-right movement together.
The
apparent modus operandi of Patriot Platform – generating coordinated flashmobs
and maintaining discipline in dress and conduct – appears to borrow heavily
from the anarchist left as well as from groups such as Extinction Rebellion.
Thomas
told his black-shirted followers in Portsmouth – who had joined what was
initially a local demonstration at the interception of a large dinghy in the
Solent between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight – that he also had the best
lawyers advising him.
“Tommy
has given me his absolute word that every man here has the very best
representation possible,” Thomas told them, later citing article 10 and 11 of
the Human Rights Act at police in defence of his group’s right to assemble.
In the
aftermath of Sunday’s unrest scores of lifejackets were abandoned on the
marina. Photograph: Ollie Thompson/Solent News & Photo Agency
The
gathering in Dover and Portsmouth were told not to film or take photographs, a
tactic that was used by far-right
agitators in Belfast during recent riots there. And while the police
have faced criticism for an intelligence failure before the Dover blockade,
there is seemingly tight control over communications.
“They are
operating in a cell-like structure, where regional organisers are putting
together the groups,” said one veteran researcher of the far right, who
admitted that it had been more difficult than usual to get into the organising
groups online.
“It’s
almost like a spiderweb where you have lots of hyper-regional groups – Essex or
Sussex patriots and so on – then ostensibly with a network above it,” added Joe
Mulhall, the director research at Hope Not Hate. “And that is almost like the
way football hooligans have operated. Thomas is the leader of the firm and then
sends messages off to each group, who themselves each has a public facing
element with Facebook groups and the like.”
People on
board the RNLI lifeboat that picked up about 140 people over the
weekend. Photograph: Barry Williams/PA
Mulhall
said there was a religious tint to the new organisation. “Patriot Platform is a
self-professed Christian ‘army of patriots’ formed to, in Thomas’s words,
‘reclaim our borders, restore order and send a clear message: Britain belongs
to the British people’,” he said. “The group functions as a vigilante unit to
combat immigration and revive what it says are Christian values, ready to
spring into action across the country at Thomas’s word.”
In
Portsmouth, Thomas had encouraged his followers to chant: “Christ is king”.
The
government has condemned what Emma Reynolds, the chief secretary to the
Treasury, described as the “thuggish and intimidating behaviour” in Dover and
Portsmouth. But not everyone experienced it in that way.
Police
and coastguard vehicles were damaged in Portsmouth and a small number of
officers were injured by flying objects, but there were no arrests. The crowd
did leave the marina, albeit reluctantly, once a dispersal order had been
executed.
Sue
Dewey, a member of the boat and sailing club Eastney Cruising Association, said
some staff members had been trapped at her club and had to sleep on sofas all
night, but she expressed her own concerns about the small boat landings.
Sue Dewey
talks to reporters in Eastney, Portsmouth after the unrest. Photograph:
Ollie Thompson/Solent News & Photo Agency
“It
didn’t get too rough, but I did get the smell of wacky baccy floating up to my
balcony,” she said. “This is the closest I’ve been to an insurrection. I’m
unhappy at the way it’s going. These people are here illegally and the French
are enabling them to come. This should make Andy Burnham wake up to what is
going on.”
Mark
Calcut, who was walking his dog near the scene on Monday morning, said he did
not attend the demonstration but dismissed the idea that what had happened was
thuggery. “I know people who attended – they were just ordinary people trying
to stop that boat coming in here,” he said.
On Monday
afternoon, the Reform
UK home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, visited Portsmouth and met
Thomas, who said Reform should not criticise his followers for wearing
balaclavas. “What do you expect the men of this country to do when they see
violence against women, sexual assaults, what would you do as a man … just
wait?” he asked.
Thomas
told Yusuf that the men wearing masks were not doing wrong and were instructed
not to take drugs, drink, shout or carry out acts of violence. He insisted what
they were doing was lawful and said children were shaking hands with them at
the protest in Dover.
Yusuf
said he would take the message back to the Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage. “I
think it’s important we listen to people,” he said of Thomas. “He was making
his points respectfully. It was a respectful conversation.”
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