Shortly after 7am last Saturday in the English coastal town of Dover, livestreamed footage distributed by Britain’s newest anti-migrant movement showed dozens of men in paramilitary outfits jumping out from the backs of vehicles, their faces covered beneath balaclavas, their hands in black gloves.

Within an hour, hundreds more masked agitators, dressed head to toe in black, some wearing silver crosses around their necks, were marching through the town’s streets, clapping and chanting “Stop the boats” and “Christ is king”, blockading the busy port for hours.

Anti-immigration protests have become a familiar sight in Britain over the past five years, with demonstrators expressing anger at successive governments’ inability to stop people arriving in small dinghies from France, across the Channel. But last weekend’s launch of the new Patriot Platform movement appeared to mark a significant shift both in rhetoric and tactics, disrupting once again the shifting ecosystem of the British far right.

A disciplined, well-organised and militaristic operation was unleashed. The new movement also displayed features of online influencer culture, with manosphere undertones, led by people who seem skilled at swiftly pulling together flashmobs of protesters and highly adept at exploiting social media’s algorithms to attract attention to their cause and fundraise. Most unnerving was the masked appearance of protesters, and the intertwining of Christian chanting with anti-migrant sentiment.

Footage of the weekend’s disruption posted on the YouTube page of the movement’s leader, Daniel Thomas, who calls himself Danny Tommo, has had, in total, more than a million views, with visitors to the site invited to pay a £4.99 monthly fee to subscribe to his channel and join the community of so-called patriots.

“We’re doing this under Christianity. We’re doing this with Christian British and English men. We’re not doing this with thugs,” Thomas, 37, tells his viewers.

But most politicians, even on the hard right, expressed instant scepticism. Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, said the display was “disgusting”. “Nobody, at any political protest, whether they’re on the left or right, should be wearing balaclavas. It is wrong, it’s horrible,” he said.

Concerned that police forces had revealed themselves to be unprepared, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said on Thursday that the government expected police officers in future to make “full use” of new powers allowing them to ban face coverings at protests.

Academics and analysts of the far right have spent the week trying to assess whether the new grouping has staying power and whether Thomas is himself sufficiently disciplined to unite a splintered anti-immigrant right.

“Is Danny Tommo a threat or a clown?” the anti-racist organisation Searchlight asked this week, before concluding: “A bit of both.”

Joe Mulhall, the director of research at Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist organisation, who has been charting the movement’s growth over the summer, described last weekend’s protests as “an alarming development”, which could prove dangerous if protesters continued to target boats carrying asylum seekers. He said the rhetoric, the optics and the movement’s recruitment strategy all represented a shift. “It’s much more vigilante in style, and organised in a more clandestine way,” he said.

In the decades since Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, with its blackshirted followers, Britain has seen an evolution of different far-right movements, their fortunes rising and falling. The National Front in the 1970s was followed by the British National party in the 1980s and 90s. The English Defence League, Britain First and Patriotic Alternative have had time in the headlines before receding in prominence. The secretive, militant neo-Nazi movement National Action, whose followers also appeared in masks and balaclavas, emerged in 2013, before it was banned as a terrorist organisation in 2016.

To many, Thomas is just the latest iteration of that tendency, but an effective one at a febrile moment. Thomas, who previously ran a roofing firm and enjoys cage fighting and boxing in his spare time, has worked as a bodyguard to the UK’s leading far-right activist, Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). The father of five has spent two years in prison for attempted kidnapping. After being released, Thomas said: “I repented; I gave my life to Jesus.” On social media he describes himself as “dedicated to defending my family and homeland, trusting in Jesus Christ, Our Saviour”.

The week began triumphantly for his agitators, with blanket media coverage both of Saturday’s visually startling protest and a second demonstration on Sunday in Portsmouth, another major port on the south coast. Late that evening and in the early hours of Monday morning, Thomas was knee-deep in the chilly seawater, attempting to prevent the landing of a boat thought to be carrying about 120 asylum seekers. He quickly rallied more masked protesters to try to stop coaches from taking the arrivals to an immigration processing centre.

As a supporter brought phone chargers and other supplies by canoe to protesters in the water, he shouted at police and volunteers with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution: “I need these migrants to go home.” Uneasily watchable as it was, the four-hour livestreamed recording of events that night has had more than 700,000 views.

The police initially described the Dover demonstration as “spontaneous”. But in fact, throughout the heatwaves of the summer, Thomas had been travelling across Britain, pulling together volunteers from small localised anti-migrant protest groups into his new umbrella movement. In clips posted to Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and X, he charted his progress towards building a network of men, who would, he claimed, become a “mass resistance group”, and would spark a “shockwave around the country” and send “shivers down the spines of those that have put this upon us”. He filmed new recruits, wearing black, lined up outside a village church and on village greens, describing them as “working-class men, bricklayers, roofers and carpenters”.

The protesters’ media coup will have made awkward viewing for Reform politicians, coinciding with their party’s annual conference, which proved fractious amid lingering questions around overseas funding.

The movement has no manifesto; its website offers vague outlines of intent, claiming that its followers are patriots who refuse “to stand by while Britain is dismantled”. Thomas has set out some of his views in short clips recorded on his phone, sitting in the driving seat of a stationary car. “For too long we’ve been walking down roads and waving flags and thinking this is somehow going to save us,” he says in one. “Migrants are having a detrimental effect on the safety of our women and children.”

By Wednesday, Thomas’s self-declared claims to be making the country safer for all Britain’s daughters, sisters and mothers had veered unexpectedly into a more idiosyncratic campaign: one to protect his own mother, and secure new housing for her, amid a row over whether an article in the Daily Mail had made it possible to identify where she lived. That afternoon, Thomas brought dozens of masked men in black shorts and hoodies to the newspaper’s central London headquarters, livestreaming himself threatening that unless the newspaper organised his mother a new home within 48 hours, he would be back again with a larger contingent of men.

Later he made an online appeal for donations to help his mother move house, because she was living in “a state of absolute fear”. “It would be right for the country to rally together and help her in this time of need,” he wrote on an online fundraiser, headed: “Help Danny Tommo’s Mum Relocate: a fresh start after unfair media harassment.” By Friday afternoon more than £62,000 had been raised.

Some online commentators said they were sympathetic to his broader aims, but were irritated by this personal fundraising drive, condemning it as grifting. Even among supporters, Thomas’s leadership style is not to everyone’s taste.

Over the past two years, Tommy Robinson has attempted to make his anti-immigration movement mainstream, explicitly calling on supporters not to attend rallies wearing face coverings, in an attempt to secure wider support. Details of his events are circulated on open Facebook groups, and often publicised weeks in advance, with police notified. Women are free to protest alongside men.

Thomas appears to be trying something new. Mulhall said: “This is less about attracting mass numbers, and more about them saying: ‘We’re going to take things into our own hands.’ They want small committed numbers of people willing to take direct action.” Success was not guaranteed, he added, noting that an attempt to launch similar action on the beaches of northern France earlier this year, branded Operation Overlord (a reference to the second world war allied D-day landings), had failed, resulting in Thomas being banned from returning to France by the French authorities, who said: “Violent and hate-inciting tactics have no place in our territory.”

Thomas has said that he wants to bring discipline to the protest movement, aims to avoid arrests and talks of having lawyers at the end of the phone. “We have clear rules, no shouting, no alcohol, no flag waving, no drugs,” he says (although the Hampshire and Isle of Wight constabulary reported damage to their vehicles and some injuries on Sunday night).

Several researchers have noted the movement’s success at spreading its message through social media. Thomas’s claims that the British way of life is under threat as a result of immigration offered “a strong sense of purpose, belonging and orientation to those anxious about their future”, said Beatriz Lopes Buarque, a fellow in AI trust and security at the University of Manchester. “Racist conspiracy theories are profitable to tech companies and, consequently, there is little incentive on their part to reduce their amplification,” she added, noting that politicians needed to “raise awareness of the nexus between harmful conspiracy theories and algorithmic amplification”.

Darja Wischerath, a research assistant at the University of Bath, who specialises in studying online and offline mobilisation of the far right, said Thomas displayed a celebrity influencer’s skill at uploading bits of content on to numerous social media sites throughout the day to keep followers engaged, building a community of like-minded people. There were manosphere undertones to some of the content, with the “misogynistic suggestion that women are helpless people need[ing] to be protected”, she said.

Footage distributed by Thomas suggests activists have been drilled over the summer to respond in unison to his questions, like troops responding to a sergeant major. “Are we here to hurt the police?” Thomas asks lines of black-clad men in a clip of the Daily Mail protest. “No,” the lines of men shout back. “Are we here to stand up for our country?” The men respond: “Yes!” “Are we here to stand up for our women?” he asks. The men reply: “Yes!” Thomas concludes by bellowing “Amen!” at his volunteers, who shout back: “Amen!”

Thomas was a tank driver with the King’s Royal Hussars, but was discharged on medical grounds before seeing active service.

The movement’s regular references to Christ have triggered dismay within the Church of England. Thomas has posted videos of himself attending church, holding a prayer book. It is not clear where he attends church, but he tells followers: “When we go to church every Sunday, we go to church as a unit.” People donating to his fundraising pages can opt instead to press a button notifying organisers that they will pray for the cause rather than giving money.

Over the past few years, Christian anti-migrant protesters have begun to position themselves against the inclusive, pro-refugee position of the established Church of England. Madeleine Pennington, the head of research with the thinktank Theos, where analysts are currently finalising a project on the rise of Christian nationalism in the UK, said research in 2013 had found little trace of the phenomenon in Britain, but said there had been a “step-change” in the past few years.

“There are many Christians who are very concerned about a framing of Christianity that they don’t recognise as their own,” she said, adding that the bulk of the marchers’ rhetoric appeared focused on anti-immigration issues rather than religion.

The bishop of Kirkstall, Arun Arora, who is the co-lead for racial justice in the Church of England, said the display of the cross on protest marches was not the cross of Christ “but rather a fashion accessory utilised by opportunists”.

This week, Thomas was branded “an idiot” by the man he and two co-conspirators tried to kidnap at knifepoint in 2016. The trio had wrongly accused their victim of stealing £10,000 of drugs from them. Thomas pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping and was jailed for two years; a judge condemned all three men for their “stupidity”. Thomas is due in court again in October, accused of going into a restricted zone in Dover earlier this year, and of threatening behaviour.

There is some uncertainty about whether he can maintain momentum and continue to rally units of protesters. But Thomas has described the Dover protest as a “dummy run” and local politicians remain uneasy.

Tony Vaughan, Labour MP in the neighbouring Folkestone and Hythe constituency, said he was concerned by the group’s “significant online coordination” that had allowed it to bring people into Kent “at very short notice and under the radar”. Police needed to “be alert to this tactic and have the intelligence and resources to respond effectively”, he said, to prevent further “intimidation and disruption”.