Meet the team behind far-right activist Tommy Robinson

The Tommy Robinson outriders were early to Epping. Wendell Daniel, a former Labour councillor who is now a film-maker for Robinson's Urban Scoop video platform, turned his microphone to a woman on the edge of the protests in the Essex town.

- By Daniel Boffey and Ben Quinn

"Look into that," he said pointing to the camera.

"Talk to Tommy, tell him you want to see him here." "Tommy," she responded, "I think you should definitely come down because you will help out the situation so much more." Robinson responded quickly: "Hear you loud & clear, I'm coming to Epping next Sunday ladies & bringing thousands more with me," he said on X. The rightwing activist Laurence Fox was coming too, he added.

For days, Epping has been the scene of demos outside the town's Bell hotel after the charging of an Ethiopian asylum seeker - who had recently arrived on a small boat - with sexual assault against a local girl.

With the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, and the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, talking up the risk of the disorder spreading further, it had appeared the perfect opportunity for Robinson, with a so-called "migrant hotel" providing the focus.

Twenty-four hours later, he appeared to have gone cold on the idea. It might not benefit him and it might not benefit Epping, he mused on camera.

It might appear an awkward volte-face, but Lucy Brown, once a right-hand woman to Robinson, chronicling his every stunt and provocative comment for social media for two years, had seen it all before. It was, the 34-year-old suggested, an insight into both his frustrating tendency to act on instinct and a reliance on the colourful team behind him, an inner circle that includes the Canadian publisher of a far-right platform and a Sikh convicted of being part of a robbery in which a shop worker was threatened with having his throat slashed.

He's very quick to believe his own myth. It takes probably a bunch of messages from people saying: 'Don't do it'. And finally he has to begrudgingly say: 'Maybe it's not a good idea'.