Harry Hilden’s post-St George’s Day march in Maidstone went ahead as planned on Saturday, with a turnout estimated at around 60. But the event was notable less for its size, than for its branding: this was effectively a Restore Britain outing, complete with the party’s flag carried prominently through the streets.

However, none of Restore’s seven Kent County Council councillors showed up, and the activists fronting the party’s recently established county branches were conspicuously absent. Hilden has done a bit of leafleting for Restore Britain lately, but he hardly counts as a party cadre.

Familiar characters

What turned up in Maidstone was the familiar cast of characters that invariably assembles when “Fash Harry” puts out the call on Facebook, supplemented by a handful of contacts from outside the county. How proud Rupert Lowe must be to see such dregs drawn irresistibly to his banner, like iron filings to a magnet.

Paul Ward, the pub-going conspiracy enthusiast who has recently popped a few Restore Britain leaflets through doors, took time out from posting on Facebook about chemtrails, the climate-change “hoax”, the Covid “plandemic” and why the earth is flat to escort his partner Nina Wood on the march.

They were accompanied by their drinking pals Carl Sayer and Lisa Beake, along with Chris Hauley and Cheryl Whybrow.

Then there was snaggle-toothed Kev “Pickles” Oliver and his partner Caley Dowdall, who got together through the “Raved in the 90’s” Facebook group (where they posted some decidedly X-rated banter) and have since bonded over shared interests in martial arts and far-right politics.

Hideous trousers

And Chris Taylor, a warehouse assistant at Currys whose whole family are avid far-right enthusiasts (including his parents, with whom he still lives), attended sporting the union-jack jacket he’s worn on numerous occasions, combined with a truly hideous new pair of union-jack trousers.

Thankfully, Chris’s hat-obsessed father, Michael Taylor, wasn’t there in his pith helmet this time.

Andy Hood, Danny Tommo’s oppo in Dover, also made it to Maidstone, though Sam Turner, the flagger who burgled Gillingham FC, was, as usual, all mouth and no show.

Somebody who definitely did show up was Hilden’s criminal associate Dean Phillpott from Erith in the London Borough of Bexley.

“Deano” was accompanied by another Erith resident, a woman called Kerrie who goes by the cryptic name of “Kp Kp” on Facebook.

Phillpott, a fixture of the Bexley flaggers scene, has a colourful criminal record: in 2020 he was sentenced to five years for possession of a prohibited firearm and drugs after police on a surveillance operation watched him take delivery of a revolver; in 2005 he received 15 months for his part in a mob-handed knife attack on two men in Abbey Wood; and more recently he pleaded guilty to drink-driving on the M25.

Also present were two leading members of the far-right stoner/content-creator community: “Mary Jane Audit” (Cameron Stevenson) and “strange life420” (Richard Strange from Romford). They quickly found each other and recognised kindred spirits.

Not-so-undercover

The highlight of their meeting was an encounter with a couple of characters sitting in a car opposite the assembly point, training a camera on marchers as they arrived.

The pair, presumably not-very-undercover police, were visibly embarrassed at being spotted and aborted their mission, taking off sharpish with rather less material for the files than expected. Surely Special Branch don’t need to employ inept surveillance operatives these days, now that the far right are comprehensively documenting themselves and sticking it all online.

Shaun Chaney had driven his slogan-splattered Tesla up from Ashford and, yet again, took pole position when the march eventually moved off.

And so the procession wended its way around central Maidstone, including part of the three-lane A229, doubtless to the chagrin of motorists, with a large banner reading “Save our nation — remigration” and a Restore Britain flag carried by Deano Phillpott.

Bemused shoppers

“Enough is enough – send them back!” they chanted as they went. The march reached its end in Jubilee Square, where the obligatory closing rally took place next to the Queen Victoria Monument. The late monarch wouldn’t have been amused. Passing shoppers were just bemused.

The diminutive Harry Hilden, perched on some street furniture to give himself a little more height, delivered in his usual gabbling style – no consonants, just vowels – a turgid tirade against immigration and housebuilding.

It was enlivened only by an ill-judged arboreal metaphor: “A tree falls in the direction it’s leaning.

“And a country does the exact same. And it’s down to us, the common people, to change the direction in where the country is heading.”

Hilden won’t be pleased when he discovers that the “Political Custard” channel on YouTube has put up this section of his speech but misattributed it to Danny Tommo who, of course, could never hope to achieve such poetic heights of rhetorical gibberish.

Grim inevitability

Next up, with grim inevitability, was Jodie Scott (“Missus Kent”). Despite being heavily pregnant, Scott – trooper that she is – had marched all the way and now delivered both a speech and a long, tedious musical set.

This included her latest excruciating composition, entitled “Revolution”, with a chord sequence nicked from the Everly Brothers and lyrics with all the imaginative flair of a rhyming dictionary: “We need a revolution / There is no other solution / Let’s break this illusion, this intrusion.”

Reversing replacement

She and her husband, Charlie Scott alias Gramson (“Mister Kent”), are certainly taking far-right natalism seriously – it’s their sixth child she’s expecting. The two of them are intent on reversing “demographic replacement” all by themselves, it seems.

Who needs Nazi “Lebensborn” baby farms to breed the Aryan super-race when Mr and Mrs Scott of Whitstable are on the job?

It must be getting crowded in their modest semi-detached. And Jodie’s going to have to shift a lot of Spotify downloads to keep them all fed, especially given that Charlie is a “house husband” who seems to spend most of his time in-line skating.

Scott, it should be noted, has previous form. Late last year it was revealed that conversations in her private WhatsApp group, “MissusKent’s Patriotic Community”, had turned fruity, with discussion of stockpiling weapons including guns and crossbows, carrying out an “Islamic genocide” and killing Keir Starmer.

The old medication

Once Missus Kent had mercifully finished her karaoke session, Hilden thanked everyone for attending, and it was all over. “All right, let’s get the old medication going,” Richard Strange told his live-stream audience, indicating that the next item of business would be the ingestion of some top-quality bud.

The march did not go unopposed. There was a spirited counter-demonstration, accompanied by a drummer, led by the banner of the Kent Anti-Fascist Solidarity Assembly proclaiming “Kent is anti-fascist”.

The crowd was substantially made up of younger people, many carrying home-made signs.

Stand Up to Racism, which was also involved in the counter-mobilisation, put the far-right turnout at around 60.

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain project now has seven councillors at Kent County Council, all of them defectors from Reform UK following months of internal chaos, making Restore the fourth-largest group at County Hall.

But none of those councillors were anywhere near Maidstone on Saturday.

Nor were the activists supposedly building Restore’s branch infrastructure in the county.

What turned up instead was the ragtag collection of flaggers, conspiracy theorists and petty criminals who have long formed the backbone of Kent’s anti-migrant protest scene.

Rupert Lowe has so far been noticably disinclined to sort out the problem of extremists – known nazis and holocaust deniers, for instance – joining the ranks of his party.

Are we to assume that he is equally at ease in the company of racist rabble-rousers like Hilden with a history of attacking and closing meetings of local councils, and with Restore’s banner being paraded through the streets of Maidstone by a man with serious firearms and knife crime convictions?