Hugo Rifkind: For now, I’m choosing to believe in Tommy Robinson’s conversion

I’ve often thought it might be interesting to meet Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Lennon, or whatever one is supposed to call the erstwhile English Defence League frontman these days. Because, well, he’s not an idiot, is he? Or at least, not to the extent you’d like him to be. And it bugged me.

I remember seeing him up against Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight a few years ago. Yes, he fell into bear-traps, quite a few of which he’d dug himself, and yes, he said more than a few things that any mainstream politician would have been crucified for, and rightly. But at core, there was something there with which Paxman simply couldn’t cope at all. This was an eloquent, white working-class voice, airing white working-class concerns. We are not good, we media and Westminster villagers, at engaging with this stuff, and Paxman certainly wasn’t. We focus merrily on the unpolished hate and prejudice, of which he espoused really quite a lot, but anything that truly unsettles us, we just ignore.

It would be another couple of years before the media — led by my colleague Andrew Norfolk at the Times — started taking at all seriously the idea that gangs of young men, invariably Muslim and predominantly of Pakistani origin, were engaged in the endemic grooming of vulnerable white girls in Oxford, Rotherham, Rochdale and God knows where else. Given that the likes of Stephen, or Tommy, had been banging on about this for ever, that should make us all feel rather queasy. Never yet, even now, have I read an interview with him in which I didn’t know precisely what it was going to say the moment I read the byline. And, when a journalist spots a hole in the narrative, it’s the journalist’s job to fill it.