I first saw Young Bob walking through Whitehall during a Tommy Robinson Christmas Carol extravaganza, fawned upon by born-again football hooligans who seemed eager to adopt him as their own son.
The “based Greta Thunberg”, as he had branded himself, seemed to have slouched right out of one of England’s grim tableaux. His stomping ground was Stratford station and Speakers’ Corner, arguing with Muslims about the divinity of Christ. He seemed incapable of walking down any given street without some ruckus involving some jobsworth copper and a minority.
Recently I scored Young Bob’s number, and sat with it for a few weeks fretting over my opening lines. To my mind, Young Bob was on the frontier of possibilities that had opened up in England’s recent rupture. He had been “doxxed” by his transgender aunt, kicked out of his home, and left to sleep on sofas while doing shifts at McDonalds.
Despite this, he still had the wherewithal to tour the country debating abortion and mass remigration with witless students who could only cover him in urine and glue. He had come to decorate his room like the gift shop of an Eastern Orthodox Church while braving conflict outside Whitechapel Mosque. Here was a young man who seemed to be living life to the fullest in the England of 2026.
We had a few back and forths over the phone. Our conversations tended to go something like this:
Me: “You said previously to me you grew up in an area undergoing demographic change. What was that like? I mean, do you think more people your age are going to become like you?
Young Bob: *Silence*
Me: “Hello, are you still there?”
Young Bob: “Yep.”
Me: “Well anyway, as I said it would be great to meet up and discuss these things
Young Bob: Yep, I’m quite busy at the moment but I’ll let you know.”
Was Young Bob really incapable of private reflection? Did he have a previous life — a hinterland outside of YouTube? Perhaps he just found me insufferable.
Beyond interviews with Calvin Robinson and arguments with Muslims at Speakers Corner did Young Bob really exist, or was he just Thomas Moffitt, the kid who had nothing left but to chase the tail winds of anti-woke free speech YouTube virality?
To my great jealousy, the YouTuber Josh Pieters recently got unfettered access to a similar, albeit less impressive brand of semi-viral budding right-wing influencer. 24-year-old George Gilbert first appeared on Big Brother as a dizzying cross between Jamie Oliver and the protagonist of a weighty drama series about a child killer. Early on in the Big Brother series, just as he was nesting in nicely with a transgender personal trainer and a farmer from Somerset, he was smuggled away by the producers in the dead of night for allegedly making anti-semitic comments.
Like Young Bob, Gilbert’s since done his own free speech tour across the country, popping up in places like Southend to do live podcasts called things such as Proper Gander. But behind the long ginger hair and the bonhomie about old England there is a curious emptiness — a void in which left to his own devices you can imagine only his eyes glazed over some screen, watching endless YouTube videos about the excesses of woke. There is a sense that he isn’t really a human being in the conventional sense at all.
The documentary was an attempted Theroux drive-by on autopilot. Pieters saw Gilbert as the product of the “manosphere”, aka “a hyperreality where a small minority of shock jocks claim to represent the views of a generation.” He was irked by his bookshelf, a mostly unread stack of Jimmy Carr books and Ian Kershaw’s multi-volume biography of Hitler.
Gilbert, despite once appearing as an extra on the latest Bridget Jones, does not watch films. He supports Man United but has come to see football as a “bread and circuses” distraction for the masses. With all this time for contemplation, he can only come out with lines like “I’m not interested in politics, I’m interested in ideas” and “The economic factor is an important reason why young people are unhappy.”
As hard as Pieters might try, nothing about Gilbert seems remotely sinister or foreboding. Once upon a time, he may have belonged to a more noble pantheon of Cameron’s “fruitcakes and loonies”. But unlike that fertile wellspring of English populism — an arcadia of swingers, pub goers, railway enthusiasts and garden centres — there is little charm or longevity in acerbic young men dabbling with Orthodox Christianity after thousands of hours of podcasts about how progressives are ruining Western civilisation.
This disconnect from the natural lay of the land struck me recently when Young Bob ran afoul of a protest in Southampton in the aftermath of the Henry Nowak verdict. While in the reverie of recording one of his videos, he and other auditors accidentally provided the local coppers with enough footage to send a few of the rioting locals down.
Young Bob took to social media to apologise. The incident offered a timely reminder that the travelling troupe of YouTubers and Citizen Journalists are not always in harmony with the England of discord they claim to speak for.
The Makerfield by-election is one of the most important in English political history, but it is also a chance for those who lurk online in the world of Young Bob and George Gilbert to meet up in real life. It strikes me as hobbyism run rampant, less a political movement than the sort of procedural hobnobbing carried out by people who do battle reenactments or meet up to discuss cult films with the ageing thespians.
If Restore fails to poll as high as their supporters believe, the crest of some beautiful wave may have broken
There was of course the now viral interview with Restore supporter Frank Wright. But I’d venture this might be an exception to the rule. For every eloquent Wright monologue, there is a Craig Houston who has travelled down from Glasgow to ask Rupert Lowe about Scottish devolution, or an excruciatingly dull interview between Montgomery Toms and the Restore candidate. This cosy “new media” activist ecosystem of backrubbing, softball questions, fawning and outrage tends to produce little of actual interest that might break containment. If Restore fails to poll as high as their supporters believe, the crest of some beautiful wave may have broken.
But I’m left worrying about Young Bob, who has found one way out of this dead end. This week he was attacked in Manchester — punched, kicked and stomped in a grotesque display of violence. Alarming as it was, there is something morbid about its status as “content.” Young Bob watchers will know this has been brewing. The repetition of a hyperstylised ritual in pursuit of this type of confrontation has more in common with J.G Ballard’s Crash than Charlie Kirk’s campus tours. So deadening and ubiquitous has the aesthetic of Britain’s decline become online, that perhaps the only way to be reminded it’s all real is to watch a teenager on the spectrum getting the shit kicked out of him. In this regard, I am reminded of a quote from Twin Peaks shouted at Laura Palmer’s funeral, the femme fatale homecoming queen whose descent only serves to entrance the town: “we all killed her”.
