“As far as I know, he’s in mainland Spain,” said Barry Armstrong, a convicted fraudster and longtime friend and supporter of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson.
This didn’t match what staff at Robinson’s favorite breakfast spot in Costa Adeje, southern Tenerife, had said earlier that morning. “He was here yesterday,” one waiter told us.
It also didn’t quite line up with Armstrong’s own Facebook activity. When a friend asked him, “Have you seen your mate—the one we’re not supposed to mention on Facebook?” Armstrong responded with a thumbs-up emoji.
Standing by his Bentley outside his whitewashed villa, wearing only his underwear, Armstrong insisted he had nothing to hide.
“I didn’t know he was here,” he said. “Nobody told me that. The woman I spoke to said he was in mainland Spain. Maybe when he visits, he’ll see me once or twice—but no more than that.”
Tenerife has long been a safe haven for Tommy Robinson, according to Nick Lowles, a biographer of the far-right activist.
In 2020, Robinson fled to the island as his life “spiraled out of control” ahead of an expensive libel trial over false claims he made about a 15-year-old Syrian refugee. At the time, he listed his address as a 10-bedroom villa in southern Tenerife, described as a “private haven of prestige.”
Now, the largest Canary Island appears to be his refuge once again—though friends insist there’s nothing suspicious about the timing of his trip.
Robinson was filmed boarding a shuttle bus at Tenerife South airport after taking a 5:55 a.m. Ryanair flight from Stansted on Tuesday.
The trip followed mobile phone footage circulating on social media showing Robinson pacing near an unconscious man at London’s St. Pancras station. He’s heard telling onlookers, “You saw him—he came at me.”
The Met Police later confirmed they wanted to question a 42-year-old man—understood to be Robinson—over an alleged assault the previous evening. The injured man was discharged from the hospital on Wednesday.
Speaking on Friday, Armstrong said he first met Robinson “five or six years ago” through a mutual friend at a restaurant.
That friend was Lutz Bachmann, leader of the far-right German group Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West), which gained notoriety a decade ago for mass marches in Dresden.
Bachmann has 22 convictions in Germany, including for drug trafficking, tax evasion, and child support violations. He has referred to African refugees as “gangs of rapists” and “throat cutters” and was banned from entering the UK in 2018 for being “not conducive to the public good.”
Bachmann moved to Tenerife eight years ago and, along with Armstrong, seems to have formed a support network for Robinson.
In his biography, Lowles wrote that Armstrong helped fund Robinson’s 2019 European Parliament campaign bus—an effort that ultimately failed.
Armstrong claims the media lies about Robinson, though his own record is far from spotless. He admitted to counterfeiting money “in the 70s and 80s” and served two months in Brixton Prison in 2000 for possessing fake share certificates.Here’s a more natural and fluent version of your text:
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He dealt with certificates for top UK companies and drafts under an international bank’s name.
“I could have appealed and gotten out of it,” Armstrong said. Not that prison was hard for him. “Loved it,” he admitted. “Made some great friends there. But back to Tommy—I swear to God I didn’t know he was here.”
Armstrong said he usually stayed at a “posh hotel” on the coast, not with him, and worked out at a gym in a shopping mall. He also claimed Bachmann hadn’t seen Robinson.
“I spoke to him yesterday, and he said he hadn’t,” Armstrong explained. “I asked, ‘Is Tommy over?’ And he said, ‘He’s not.’ He would’ve told me—we’re mates. Then someone else told me he’s in mainland Spain. It’s a mystery to me.”
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This version keeps the original meaning while making the language smoother and more conversational. Let me know if you’d like any further refinements!
