MOSCOW — Tommy Robinson, the most recognizable figure on Britain’s far right, spent Tuesday evening in the bar of Moscow’s Hotel Metropol filming himself with Errol Musk, father of the world’s richest man, and telling his 1.9 million followers on X that the two of them were going to cause some trouble.
The video, shot at the Shalyapin Bar of the five-star hotel a few hundred meters from the Kremlin, shows Robinson announcing he is enjoying my day with the 80-year-old Musk, who greets Robinson’s followers and answers the trouble line with a correction of his own: no trouble, doing things right, The Telegraph reported via Yahoo News. Musk had come to Moscow from the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Kremlin’s flagship investment showcase, where he was among the more prominent Western guests.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was unbothered by questions about what a British activist with a string of convictions was doing in the Russian capital. I’ve come to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilised society here, he told the Guardian, adding that Russia is not the enemy of Britain and mocking those who say otherwise. It is his second known visit, after a 2020 trip.
The meeting compresses an entire political realignment into one bar tab. Robinson’s rehabilitation from jailed agitator to international far-right celebrity has run substantially through the Musk family: Elon Musk amplified the Free Tommy Robinson campaign during Robinson’s imprisonment for contempt of court, reposts his material to hundreds of millions of users, and has made Robinson’s cause a recurring grievance against the British government. The father drinking with Robinson in Moscow is the family franchise extending the courtesy in person.
For Moscow, the optics require no embellishment. The Metropol has hosted a century of Western pilgrims, and Russian officialdom has spent years cultivating sympathetic Western influencers who present Russia as the orderly alternative to a decadent West. A British nationalist praising Russian civilization on camera, beside the father of the owner of X, is precisely the artifact that effort exists to produce, and Robinson supplied it free of charge.
The timing at home gives the trip its edge. Robinson’s movement is ascendant in a Britain convulsed by the politics he built, as The Eastern Herald reported when far-right channels turned a Belfast stabbing into a night of riots this week, and as Nigel Farage prepares to headline CPAC’s first British edition. The street movement, the parliamentary insurgency and the social platform that powers both now share a set of friends, and increasingly they include the Kremlin’s guest list.
British officialdom has long warned about exactly this traffic. Successive governments have accused Moscow of cultivating the British far right as an instrument of polarization, and Robinson’s cheerful presence at the Metropol, announced rather than concealed, suggests how little the warnings now deter. The activist calculates, probably correctly, that his audience regards the British establishment’s disapproval as a credential.
What trouble the pair intend, neither man said. Robinson teased future announcements and the company kept its mystery, which serves everyone involved: the activist gets a news cycle, the Musk name supplies the reach, and Moscow gets the tableau. Speculation in British far-right channels ran from a documentary project to a speaking tour, all of it unconfirmed.
The episode also measures how far the gravitational center of the Anglophone right has drifted. A decade ago a British nationalist would have paid a price for toasting Russia; today the route from London grievance politics to Moscow hospitality runs through an American social network and an American billionaire’s family, and the only people scandalized are the ones Robinson profits from scandalizing.
Robinson will come home to a country where his rallies fill streets and his prosecutions fill dockets, and the Metropol video will live on as recruitment material for both. Whatever the trouble turns out to be, the photograph of it was the point: Britain’s far right, the Musk family and the Russian capital, together in one frame, none of them hiding.
