If the turnout for yesterday’s London event organised by Tommy Robinson was modest, the numbers for Nick ‘Taco’ Tenconi’s day out in Dover were positively embarrassing.
Only around three dozen bothered to respond to his call to ‘take back Dover’ and a good number of those were shipped in from elsewhere. The result was another Tenconi clown show.
The event was live-streamed in its entirety by two self-styled “citizen journalists”, who despite being supportive, only managed to capture the total ignominy of the day’s proceedings where Tenconi desperately tried to conceal the pitiful turnout behind a big “mass deportations” banner.
Sinking ship
One was Sydney Jones (alias “Citizen Syd” alias “Journo Jones”) a young, female far-right content creator from Norwich. Her partner, the dreadful James Harvey, had also made the trip to the south coast.
Jones joined UKIP earlier this year, a fine example of someone gaily leaping aboard a sinking ship.
Itinerant protester
The other was the elderly itinerant Croydon protester (and UKIP member) “Brexit Brian” Stovell.
(Brexit Brian also documented on social media every aspect of his outing to the coast, in quite excruciating detail – right down to a photo of his £9.50 fish supper on Friday night.)
Other content creators from the far-right online ecosystem were also present – including the rather odd woman who operates on social media as “CP Reports”.
UKIP wonderland
Nick Tenconi did actually turn up this time, being greeted on his arrival by a limp chorus of “Walking in a UKIP Wonderland” (including the line “There’s only one Nick Tenconi”).
The strutting would-be Mussolini from Eastbourne had his ego further fluffed when the Ulster Unionist landlady of the Golden Lion pub, Olwyn Newby (alias Brackenridge), rushed out of her boozer to pose for a photo with Il Duce.
Tenconi gave an interview to yet another “citizen journalist” who was present, saying with a smirk that he’d only come for a glass of Peroni in Olwyn’s pub and sarcastically commenting that asylum seekers were fleeing the outbreak of World War III in France: “trust me – I’ve only got a degree in it, but I know what I’m talking about”.
Tidy crowd
Given the clash with Tommy Robinson’s Christmas sing-song in London, Stovell was pleasantly surprised by the turnout, which he pronounced “a very tidy little crowd”.
“I thought we’d be lucky to get 20 or 30”. Instead, there were as many as 40 to 50, he claimed – albeit drawn from a very wide catchment area.
A contingent of Pink Ladies had come down from Norwich; and some of the Southampton Patriots had turned out too, bringing their portable scrolling electronic display board, which alternated political slogans with an advert for Allan’s Snackbar.
Brexit Brian did manage to find one local to interview, though. He said he’d grown up in Dover back in the days when there were “literally two immigrants” in the town.
Brian’s unknown heritage
This prompted Stovell to tell the lone Dovorian that he himself was from London, with pure English blood on his mother’s side.
Alas, Brian couldn’t say what his heritage was on the other side, as he never met his dad and doesn’t know where he was from (“but it don’t matter, does it?”).
A bucket was produced, to seek donations for UKIP’s investigative work on the beaches of France which, donors were assured, is serious stuff, not like the charades put on by some other cross-channel far-right panhandlers.
Eccentric headgear
UKIP’s enthusiasm for eccentric headgear was once more on display, with a man on a mobility scooter wearing a pith helmet, presumably in a spirit of nostalgia for the Empire (or perhaps the 1970s sitcom It Ain’t Half Hot Mum).
Faversham’s “Fash Harry” Hilden had backed the event online and was there in the crowd, wearing an “NEFD” (National Emergency Faversham Division) hat, with at least one companion, but clearly present only in a minor supporting role.
He later posted on Facebook that it “was nice to be at a march what I’m not leading or speaking at in Kent for once actually lol”.
Hilden ended up carrying one of three massive crucifixes that were deployed at the head of the march.
Shaun Chaney from Ashford also turned up yet again, positioning himself ahead of the march in his hideously decorated Tesla and playing rave music on his sound system.
Before the march set off, Tenconi gave a speech setting out his programme for government, which, as well as the mass deportation of immigrants, included the forced relocation of UK “Communists” to North Korea.
Once the marchers had formed up, he insisted on delaying their departure so he could make an esoteric point (much to the crowd’s apparent bemusement) about the “symmetrical cross” on one of UKIP’s banners being akin to the Maltese Cross on a nearby St John’s Ambulance building and not at all similar (he was keen to emphasise) to the German Iron Cross.
With this vital issue cleared up, the march finally got underway, only to stop when Il Duce again decided to halt proceedings so he could deliver a further tangential discourse, this time bemoaning the general state of Dover town centre, its lack of Christmas decorations and the large number of Turkish barbers that one sees everywhere these days.
Counter-demo
As well as the usual slogans (“Tell the nation, deportation”), the marchers gave an enthusiastic rendition of one attacking trans rights: “If you’re born with a willy, you’re a man”.
In Market Square, the march encountered a modest, but spirited, counter-demonstration and again halted for a while. “Come and get rid of us!”, a smirking Tenconi kept shouting from behind a line of police.
The march then proceeded to the seafront, where there was yet another pause, this time for a photo opportunity.
“If everyone could look towards France, please”, commanded Tenconi, helpfully pointing out that it was on the other side of the English Channel.
Unhinged diatribe
He exhorted his followers to chant until their throats bled (“we love the taste of blood!”) and then began an unhinged diatribe, in which he warned of “the state and the intelligence services” using agents to undermine the far right.
He denounced with considerable venom “the subversive little shits who are trying to derail our movement on the right” and declared “tolerance and kindness is over!”
At last, the march stopped for the concluding rally. Tenconi thanked the crowd for its composure when confronted by anti-fascists. “I know what you want to do”, he said, but the police had been there.
Demonic forces
Then off he rambled again, telling the crowd that even atheists and agnostics had to agree that the left are literally “possessed” by demonic forces.
Harry Hilden, in his capacity as cross-bearer, meekly took instructions from Tenconi on how to hold his crucifix, as if he were a shy little altar boy (“I just love choreography”, quipped Il Duce).
UKIP’s lone Kent County Council member, Amelia Randall, read out a slyly worded speech whose poisonous political message was all the more dangerous for its sugar-coating of apparent reasonableness.
Then came yet more deranged meanderings from Tenconi, whom no-one could ever accuse of reasonableness (apparent or otherwise).
He denounced the RNLI as a “terrorist organisation”; ranted about a mosque that’s being built 365 miles away from Dover; fumed about councillors who “kiss the ring” when they should be “going mental”; demanded the return of the death penalty; declared “I have given you the education, now the hard yards must begin”; and chucked in a Bible quote to finish.
Such was the culmination of Brexit Brian’s eighth or ninth trip to Dover (he couldn’t quite remember). Next week, he’s in Wakefield to support the Pink Ladies there – then that’s him done for another year.
One person notable by his absence was UKIP’s Chairman Ben Walker, though it’s fair to say he’s absent from far more of these events than he bothers to attend. By our reckoning it’s only been three this year. And the big show at Whitechapel wasn’t even one of them.
We do wonder when it will dawn on Tenconi that he’s the mug, out there travelling the country, wearing out his vocal chords spouting mob-pleasing nonsense, and having to be looked after by a bunch of gone-to-seed football hoolies, while Ben Walker rests up in the west country, drawing a healthy salary and doing whatever he does with the ‘Stop The Boats’ fund and the legacy money that still flows UKIP’s way.
Just wondering…
